The House on Mango Street

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.