My Journey to The House on Mango Street

     What separates Young Adult Fiction from any other genre of books is that it successfully deals with one of the most difficult as well as defining periods in a person’s life: adolescence…painfully awkward and eye-opening, but still essential to growth. It is a popular genre simply because of all the teenagers out there who can relate to everything written in the books and have an easier time experiencing adolescence as a result.

     My English teacher brought in an armful of hardcover books and passed them out some time during the second week of school. The novel looked unexpectedly thin, a far cry from other, lengthier classic books I had expected in the English curriculum. The cover was adorned with a freakishly cartoonish picture of a crimson-colored house and a girl peering out of it through a window.

     As my class travelled through the story, we met Esperanza Cordero, her family, and all the eccentric characters that lived on her street. We learned about Esperanza’s hopes, dreams, thoughts, and emotions, all the while laughing at boys who thought clouds looked like God and girls who married marshmallow salesmen. As I began to ponder Esperanza’s story more deeply, I started to realize why we were even bothering to read such a book in a 9th grade English class, especially when it contained fragmented sentences and scattered ideas that were usually strongly discouraged in writing.

     Esperanza is a girl at the cusp between childhood and adulthood. She’s beginning to recognize her own identity and goals for the future, but at the same time struggling with growing up. It’s a situation that most young adults find themselves in. And while most young adults do not live on a “Mango Street”, they can still relate reasonably well to Esperanza’s experiences. First off, Esperanza does not like who she is, starting from her own name. She feels that it is too long and gives away the wrong image of who she is. More importantly, Esperanza is ashamed of where she lives and how her family is too poor to be able to afford a better home. Her greatest dream is to be able to own a “house of her own” someday that she will be proud to live in. Although this seems too distant from some teenagers’ lives, everyone is probably ashamed of their identity in some way or another. Many young adults don’t feel too great about their family, their heritage, the clothes they wear, or the way they act. They wish to escape from these conditions. If this is the case, then they all have something in common with Esperanza.

     Esperanza is a generally likeable character who is intelligent, vivacious, and determined but human at the same time. Readers feel her emotions and empathize with her as she describes major events that occur during her one-year stay on Mango Street. She is happy and relieved when she makes her first friends, self-conscious and embarrassed when forced to dance with ugly shoes on at a party, and shocked and traumatized during her first sexual encounter. During this time, she gradually loses some of her childhood innocence and gains emotional maturity. It is not an easy period of time, full of ups and downs and much awkwardness on Esperanza’s part. However, it successfully and realistically captures the process of a person’s coming of age. At the end, Esperanza emerges unscathed, the only difference being her new ideas about the people around her and a better sense of the woman she is striving to become. Readers, after learning about Esperanza, are reminded that everyone has the power to overcome painful or awkward experiences.

     Another aspect that separates The House on Mango Street from other classic novels is the style in which it is written, in a series of short vignettes made up of simple sentences. There are no vocabulary words that belong on an SAT list, nor any grammar that your teacher would approve of. Younger readers are able to understand what is going on in the story, yet the language is complex enough for older readers to still study. There are descriptive similes and personification as well as sentences that contain more meaning than they seem to have at first. It is precisely this quality that allows the book to be enjoyed by everyone, not just a small selection of educated scholars.

     Although The House on Mango Street is not necessarily a literary classic in terms of language and writing, it is a truly timeless book when it comes to conveying ideas about adolescence and what it means to really live in this world. In other words, it is one of the best Young Adult novels that there is to read.