The House on Mango Street: Classic or Classic Hype?

Book Review:  The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

The House on Mango Street was just plain irritating. With an unreliable narrator, this book is written in a voice that I don't particularly care to read. It's the diary of teenage kid, plain and simple. 

Sandra Cisneros tries too hard. On the one hand, the writing is slangy and informal to capture the narrator's voice, and then she inserts gobs of heavy or inappropriate metaphors. Here's one that bugged me:

"...Angel Vargas learned to fly and dropped from the sky like a sugar donut..."

Okay, really, did you mean sugar donut? Because when I try to imagine this, I get nothing but sugar donut. I don't see Angel Vargas falling like a sugar donut, I just see a sugar donut. Sugar donuts don’t really have any special falling quality—they fall like everything else.  She could have said that Angel Vargas fell like a loaf of bread or a box of kleenex.  Maybe she was trying to get across that he fell like anything falls, but the metaphor is just a distraction. Here--I think the author is trying to get a rise out of the audience by including some random metaphor that doesn't really fit. Hey look, I'm deep, I'm using an inappropriate metaphor here. Real deep. Oh gosh I know this is supposed to read like poetry, but it feels contrived. And when I feel like an author is trying to manipulate me, I'm bitter.

Hmmm, what else. I didn't like any of the characters, and I didn't care about any of the characters. Sure, the vignettes just gave a slice of a glimpse of some of the minutiae of this life and this neighborhood, but what does it matter if you don't care? The narrator's dispassionate approach to everything was contagious.  

I guess what bugged me the most was that reading this book was like reading the essays of my fourth grade students, which aren't that great in the grand scheme of things. I understand it's in the point of view of a barrio kid, and everybody's excited about this kind of literature, but it just left me wanting. Wanting other books.

Books that accomplish similar goals that I would rather read than The House on Mango Street:

• The Dead by James Joyce. A somewhat similar style, but so so so so much better. 

• Inside the WhiteHouse: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay. Someone else's diary with a better story, better writing, and likable characters. (And John Hay wanted to be a poet.)

• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, if you really love metaphors. I ripped this book apart in an earlier review because of the heavy-handed use of figurative language, but at least the characters and the story are compelling. By the way, Zusak unabashedly admitted that he tried to put at least one good metaphor on each page. Too much! But aside from that, the story was very good.

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, the master of words. Okay world, if you want to learn how to make the English language sound like poetry, read this book. Mr. Capote doesn't club you over the head with the metaphors, he just quietly sneaks them in. 

• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. This book also has a dispassionate narrator, but the dialogue is superb.

I've noticed this book on reading lists for middle and high schoolers. Kids either love it or hate it (I think mostly hate it, which explains its low score of 3.5 on the Goodreads review). Save this experiment with literary forms for the older kids.

I'm glad I read it to see what all the hype is about; now I'm wondering what all the hype is about.