Author's Craft in House on Mango Street

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The House on Mango Street, I hear, is very appealing to many people who read it. While it is full of personification, imagery, and hones in on a different culture that isn't heavily represented in today's adolescent literature, it did not particularly strike my fancy in any way. To be completely honest, it was incredibly hard to get past the first fifty pages.

I had two issues arise while reading the text. My first issue was the lack of quotation marks around dialogue. This is a part of Sandra Cisneros's craft, who predominantly writes poetry and prose pieces, and constructed The House on Mango Street in the same structure as prose and poetry. Without quotation marks or prior knowledge of how to read poetry, readers can become confused when coming into a scene that contains heavy dialogue. My second issue were the randomness of the chapters. The chapters were written into very short one or two pages and would ramble along about a different topic every chapter. They all ended up coming together in the end, but if I were to be reading this in middle or high school, I would have given up due to the lack of a plot line. It's like all of the elements of a story are there, you just have to dig for the answers to what you're looking for, which can be pleasing for some and irritating to others.

As a future middle school teacher, I could see myself teaching a few chapters from this text, especially "Hair" and "My Name." They are both incredibly imagery and personification-heavy and could aid in showing students how to identity and understand those particular literary devices.

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