This is pretty famous contemporary book that I finally got around to reading when i picked it up a library book sale. I have also felt as if i had to read it since it is consider such a seminal Hispanic/Latino work.
I found the vignettes a mixed bag. Some were interesting and others just seemed like filler. I am a fan of vignette books, and I like when every vignette feels haunting after you have finished it. Certainly some in here did leave me like that and I appreciated the well defined throughlines throughout the text. But..I guess it boils down to just..I don't get why this book is so raved about. It is certainly engaging and does of a great job of staying true to its heritage without seeming unwelcoming of a non-Hispanic reader. It can be read by both and child and an adult and feel fulfilling to both. But I found all the characters except the narrator (Esperanza) to be one-dimensional. The mother who wished she would have stayed in school, the sassy little sister, the hard working father, etc. The short nature of each of the vignettes could have something to do with this (Esperanze is the only one in each of them), but all the reviews always rave about the characters. Peace

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Actually, left it on the information rack by the indoor entrance to the Moosewood. It is the black rack with all the music information/brochures on it. Peace!

Not something I would have thought of reading normally, but I'm glad it fell into my hands. Took me a while to read it even though it's very short because it's made up of vignettes without much of a connecting thread. The author is a poet, and I think it shows; this really just isn't a novel. There is a central character Esperanza, who herself is developing into a poet; sometimes the narrative voice is that of a teenage girl, but some of the vignettes are elaborately poetic, which can be a disconcerting shift of tone. The glimpses of life in Chicago are sometimes vivid, sometimes feel vague or unreal. The most problematic aspect is that characters and incidents are introduced then dropped without further mention, disrupting a sense of development of the protagonist -- in fact, it's sometimes hard to believe all these things are happening to the same person. To take one example, in one chapter an aunt (never mentioned again) gets Esperanza a job at a photo-processing shop. Esperanza attends her first day of work and is very shy around the other employees. But one man is friendly and she starts to think this might not be too bad, but then he grabs her and kisses her on the mouth and won't let go. End of story. We aren't told what happened after, if she continued to work at the photo shop, if she got some other job... This incident, like most others in the book, might as well not have happened for all it's ever alluded to again. So, as a collection of vignettes or prose poems that might not all have happened to the same person, this sort of works, but not as a novel. I don't mean to say it's a bad book, though; it was well worth reading. The author does often have a gift for choosing the right language, the right details, to bring a scene to life.

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East Hill Plaza