The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisnero

I found the novella in my mother's laundry room and fell to reading it, more shamelessly to fulfill my "read 52 books a year" quota than anything else. But I picked it up because I've heard the title long ago, and was intrigued.

It's a candid telling of childhood poverty, coming of age, tragic and comic characters, in the same era and social setting of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. (So much of it must resonate with my mom's childhood.) The chapters pages are brief as poems, each a tribute to a character or incident.

The author is of course hispanic, and falls into the category of "writing what we know." Will I, too, write what I know? Will my stories (which lately have been developing along the lines of character sketches, of tragic and the burden of parentage and immigraion) be a social product too?