Today, I read the introduction and the first four chapters of “The House on Mango Street”. They might seem a lot, but actually they are only 14 pages. Chapters are very short. I think it is too early for me to form un opinion about the book (I’ll talk about this later) but, for now, I can tell that I'm liking.

The writer, Sandra Cisneros, was born in Chicago in 1954. Her father was Mexican and her mother Chicana (that is to say, American with Mexican origins). She writes her first poetry at the age of ten years. In high school she is the editor of a literary magazine. But is in a literary workshop, in 1974, that she becames aware to be different from the others, due to her roots, and that this fact can give a unique potencial to her writing.

“The House on Mango Street”, her first novel, published in 1984, takes life from this counsciousness. In the introduction of the book she writes:

“ I searched for the "ugliest" subjects I could find, the most un-"poetic"—slang, monologues in which waitresses or kids talked their own lives. I was trying as best I could to write the kind of book I had never seen in a library or in a school, the kind of book not even my professors could write. Each week I ingested the class readings and then went off and did the opposite. It was a quiet revolution, perhaps a reaction taken to extremes, but it was out of this negative experience that I found something positive: my own voice.”