The House on Mango Street cover

The House on Mango Street

by Sandra Cisneros

A girl on Mango Street. She's already planning her escape.

For you if

you are from somewhere that feels too small for you and you haven't left yet

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Esperanza Cordero grows up in a Latino neighborhood in Chicago, watching the women around her get stuck — in houses, in marriages, in the block. She wants to leave and she wants to come back and she knows both things are true simultaneously. Cisneros tells this in vignettes — short, spare, prose-poem chapters that together build a complete world. The most widely taught Latina novel in American schools and the one that most completely captures what it feels like to be a girl who can see exactly what the world is trying to make of her and is already planning her escape. A dispatch from inside the specific geography of a Chicago barrio and the imagination that exceeds it.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Mexico • Latin America
Voice
Written by a Mexican author

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