Journal Six

I learnt a lot of writing skills after reading the House on Mango Street. Ciseneros does really good on narration and characterization, she made the people and places come to life. She also used a lot of similes and metaphors which make the stories much more interesting to read. The sequence of the stories in the book is well organized; it showed me how the children in the Mango Street grow up and what they have to go through as a kid in a poor neighborhood. The stories are short but they just inspired us to think more about the in-depth meaning conveyed from each stories. The weakness of the book is that there are a lot of grammatical problems and it’s sometimes confusing to read; Ciseneros narrates stories with a lot of dialogues but she does not clearly indicate who the speaker is most of the time.

My favorite story is “Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes” which is the last story in the book. She says, “They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.” In the previous stories, Ciseneros actually showed how much Esperanza doesn’t want to stay in Mango Street and choose her own way of life. She was ashamed to be poor and she wants to escape from the poor neighborhood. However, although she left the Mango Street at last, she just didn’t forget who she really is and she come back to the Mango Street to help the others who got stuck there.