I have stumbled across a favorite coming-of-age character in this book. This story is about a 12-year old Mexican-American girl, Esperanza. "In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting."

The book includes 41 vignettes that progress through the year in the house. They are tales of her and her younger sister, Nenny, and their adventures and relationships within the neighborhood. They move into this old decrepit house that is finally their own, but a far cry from the house they had hoped for. Still cramped, the family of 6 still using the same bathroom, and sharing bedrooms in a house with a crumbling exterior and no yard.

One of my favorite substories is one where the girls--Esperanza, Nenny, Rachel aand Lucy (neighborhood friends) are given some old pairs of high-heeled shoes that happen to fit them. The girls are transformed by these shoes and suddenly their skinny girlish legs have morphed into attractive, womanly legs. They are warned by some of their male neighbors that these suggestive shoes are not meant for little girls, but the girls ignore them, until other men tease them with sexual comments. Frightened Lucy leads the girls back to Mango Street where they hide the shoes on Rachel's and Lucy’s porch. Later their mother throws the shoes away and they are not missed.

Towards the end of the book Esperanza becomes an observer of the older women in the neighborhood and their lives that are anchored to Mango Street. "She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window."

Wonderful book! Next, on to Caramelo, another from the author, Sandra Cisneros.