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The House on Mango Street Hardcover – April 26, 1994
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
“Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review
The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting."
Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from.
- Reading age1 year and up
- Print length160 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Lexile measure870L
- Dimensions5.4 x 0.67 x 6.77 inches
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateApril 26, 1994
- ISBN-10067943335X
- ISBN-13978-0679433354
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Afortunado! Lucky! Lucky the generation who grew up with Esperanza andThe House on Mango Street. And lucky future readers. This funny, beautiful book will always be with us.” —Maxine Hong Kingston
“Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage . . . and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Marvelous . . . spare yet luminous. The subtle power of Cisneros’s storytelling is evident. She communicates all the rapture and rage of growing up in a modern world.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“A deeply moving novel...delightful and poignant. . . . Like the best of poetry, it opens the windows of the heart without a wasted word.” —Miami Herald
“Sandra Cisneros is one of the most brillant of today’s young writers. Her work is sensitive, alert, nuanceful . . . rich with music and picture.” —Gwendolyn Brooks
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Her classic, coming-of-age novel, The House on Mango Street, has sold over six million copies, has been translated into over twenty languages, and is required reading in elementary, high school, and universities across the nation.
In addition to her writing, Cisneros has fostered the careers of many aspiring and emerging writers through two non-profits she founded: the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. She is also the organizer of Los MacArturos, Latino MacArthur fellows who are community activists. Her literary papers are preserved in Texas at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.
Sandra Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico and earns her living by her pen. She currently lives in San Miguel de Allende.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
When we meet Esperanza Cordero, the almost mystically knowing young Chicana narrator of The House on Mango Street, she is already very much a canny teller of tales, speaking in medias res, in the midst of an unfolding story of her heroic quest to find a true home.
“We didn’t always live on Mango Street,” she begins. She details a litany of her family’s peregrinajes through previous houses in Chicago, as if reading from some codex memorializing a series of sacred migrations: “Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can’t remember. But what I remember is moving a lot. Each time it seemed there’d be one more of us. By the time we got to Mango Street we were six – Mama, Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me.”
Involuntary peregrinations and deprivations spark Esperanza’s imagination. Her family has had to leave their previous residence when the “water pipes broke and the landlord wouldn’t fi x them because the house was too old. We had to leave fast.” Esperanza dreams of a house with “running water and pipes that worked.” She imagines a house with “three washrooms so when we took a bath we wouldn’t have to tell everybody.” It would be a white house, surrounded by a proper yard with trees and grass. “This was the house Papa talked about when he held a lottery ticket and this was the house Mama dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went to bed.”
But as Esperanza candidly reveals, the family’s new house on Mango Street only has one bathroom, and “Everybody has to share a bedroom – Mama and Papa, Carlos and Kiki, me and Nenny.”
“I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn’t it. The house on Mango Street isn’t it.” And then, fathoming her disappointment and longing, Esperanza takes us into her confidence, she shares something that is beyond an intuition – it’s a glimpse at a secret, deeper knowing of unknown origin that will propel and inflect the unforgettable stories that are to come: “For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know how those things go.”
How can she know this? How can such she already know the way things go? And why is she offering us her testimonio?
It’s Esperanza’s ineluctable knowing and her indelible way of expressing it which transfi xes readers around the globe with a universal human story of a young girl’s becoming, establishing The House on Mango Street over decades as the first Latinx American classic of world letters. Seven million copies have been sold in the United States, and millions more abroad, in as many as twenty-six translations. Notably, it is also the fi rst book by a US-born Latinx writer to be included in the legendary and august Everyman’s Library series, auspicious indeed for the author and the book – as well as for the series. And as celebrated as the novel has been in the forty years since its publication, it’s important to point out that despite wide adoption in school curricula, it has also been banned from schools in numerous fl ashpoints during America’s recent and ongoing culture wars, officially cited for “age appropriateness” – but it’s Esperanza’s searing powers of observation, and her “knowing” of the world around her, especially coming from a young Chicana, that seem to strike fear in some people’s hearts.
As the author of The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros brings a profound new embrace of a unique literary legacy of the Americas to the Everyman series, as an American writer who is mestiza, feminista, urbana, cosmopolitana, and sin vergüenza – all without shame.
Esperanza’s limpid voice, her deceptively simple diction, her unique lyrical vernacular, belie a profound understanding of the complex intricacies of our humanity that can’t be fully explained, but it has deep roots in the experiences, readings, and understandings of the author, herself an oracle of a knowing that eludes explanation.
*
I met Sandra Cisneros in my hometown of San Antonio, Texas in 1983, just before the publication of The House on Mango Street by a small Latino publishing house in Houston, Arte Público Press, that first published works of now well-known Latinx writers, as well as “lost” Latinx literary works. Vivacious, loquacious, and audacious, with an electric halo of ebony curls, she was by then entirely a protean whirlwind of literary marvel. She was just back from a walkabout across Europe (including four months in Yugoslavia), and the Mediterranean. Both of us were aspiring writers, but her aspirations were feverishly inquisitive, passionate and opinionated, volubly rooted in a commitment to writing as an act of bounding invention, and social conscience. A poet and fiction writer, she possessed a documentary eye that saw the many ways the world oppressed the poor and the marginalized.
She was a force unlike any I’d yet encountered, determined to use her gifts to sow new seeds in the fallow fi elds of American letters, so long ignorant and dismissive of voices like hers. And Chicanx letters, the work of Mexican American writers, were in an uncertain, in-between moment, emerging from a rich movimiento history into we-knew-not-yet what was to come.
As fate would have it, we were the finalists to become the inaugural Director of the literature program at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, a newly created haven for Mexican American arts, literature, music, and theater in my hometown of San Antonio. Sandra (forgive the familiarity, but to refer to her any other way feels fake) got the job, but in meeting her then, I gained a lifelong literary ally, interlocutor, mentor, and occasional conspirator.
I had learned much from powerful women writers. I grew up with the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, had carried on a fraught correspondence with Laura (Riding) Jackson, and now Sandra arrived in San Antonio with a spell-binding sense of her own destiny, a destiny that would shortly unfold further in grand ways that were somehow against all odds while possessing a certain inevitability. She was an inspiration, and indeed, in three-hundred-year-old San Antonio she would eventually become La Sandra, a transforming presence for the city, and eventually for American literature.
It would take a while yet for the world to fully take note of The House on Mango Street, the mesmerizing testimonio of the journey of Esperanza Cordero among the souls and spaces of her Chicago neighborhood, as she struggles to assert her place in the world, as she longs for the dreamed-of house of her own. The path of this now universally classic novel to this Everyman’s Library edition would be lengthy, and bumpy.
After the book’s initial publication by the Houston small press, Sandra met her agent and forever since dharma companion Susan Bergholz. It was with the eventual publication of The House on Mango Street by Vintage Books in 1989 that the novel would begin to find its staggering, first national, then ever-widening global readership. But that wasn’t thanks to any career-forging reviews in major newspapers or literary journals, virtually all of whom maintained their studied inattention and ignored the book. I remember it more as a gradually rising tide of word-of-mouth revelations, people passing the book along to one another like the talisman of a new reckoning with ourselves.
Like my thirteen-year-old daughter Francesca, who recently read the copy I handed her for the first time, after which she shared: “As a young Latina who is still figuring out everything, this book gave me so many ways to relate to the young protagonist. I saw myself in her, and I think many other girls my age could too. The feeling of not wanting to be contained – to not be limited to the things we get to do, say, or experience. The longing for more is something I cannot only greatly appreciate, but also deeply understand. I loved this book because usually when adults try to get into the minds of children, it’s a colossal fail. It’s unrealistic – and can even feel like they’re mocking us. It just doesn’t sit right. Sandra goes into the minds of children in a realistic way, adding beautiful touches of vibrant culture that makes me proud to be a Mexican American.”
You get it? Literally millions have shared this experience, and this is a book that continues to light up souls.
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf (April 26, 1994)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 160 pages
- ISBN-10 : 067943335X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679433354
- Reading age : 1 year and up
- Lexile measure : 870L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.4 x 0.67 x 6.77 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #587,101 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #895 in Hispanic American Literature & Fiction
- #6,162 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #31,115 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and the American Book Award, and of fellowships.
Photo by By ksm36 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers praise the book's writing quality, describing it as poetic and powerful. They find the book interesting and eye-opening, providing an effective way to learn about the world. Many readers appreciate the simple, concise, and easy-to-understand language. The characters are described as authentic and unique, with the author's voice being authentic to the characters. Overall, customers feel the book is worth reading and provides a good value for money.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book's writing style engaging and poetic. They appreciate the powerful imagery and figurative language used to convey the emotions and fears of a young girl coming of age in a harsh environment. The narrator's narration is described as likable and dynamic. The style works well for readers of different reading abilities, including dyslexic and ADHD children. Overall, customers find it an interesting and short read with an interesting format.
"...This book helped me find great appreciation for my younger years." Read more
"...The book is written in many short stories or vignettes of two to three pages rather than one long novel of chapters...." Read more
"...The imagery is where it's at. The figurative language used is so effective. The narrator herself is also very likable and dynamic...." Read more
"...I really enjoyed the way the other wrote this book. The story is grouped into small anecdotes instead of the normal chronologically written books...." Read more
Customers find the book an interesting way to learn about the author's world. They say it's a teachable experience and wonderful to reflect on in class. The book is eye-opening and deepens their understanding of humanity. It speaks to the experiences of young girls, young brown girls, and children growing up in the barrio.
"The preface is awesome. The book: some pieces are much stronger than others. If you love Mango, though... read her poetry!..." Read more
"Positives: This book is considered a cultural classic so an informed person might like to take a look at it to see why...." Read more
"expands cultural awareness" Read more
"...Some things are explicit; some things are subtle. This book is a teachable experience." Read more
Customers find the book interesting and meaningful. They say it's a good read that adds many topics you would not expect to. The book is considered an important piece of literature that gives them an idea of daily graces, mercies, trials, struggles, and more. It's a collection of the recollections of a girl growing up in a lower class.
"...know beans about the art of memoir, but this little gem made me cry, laugh, and feel closer to my family and my formative years...." Read more
"...and ideas about boys and her Hispanic friends are especially interesting and worthwhile reading about...." Read more
"...book does not have much depth to it, it is a fascinating read and adds many topics that you would not expect to appear within this book...." Read more
"...I personally found the book impactful even though I could not relate to most of the stories. It is a short read and has a very interesting format...." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's value for money. They find it reasonably priced and in good condition for its age.
"Was bought for som in highschool. Book in treasonable shape for the price." Read more
"Daughter needed it for English class!! Came in on time & great price!" Read more
"...was able to just download the entire book for him to read and the price was great considering other places we tried to locate it in...." Read more
"...GREAT PRICE." Read more
Customers find the book easy to read and understand. They appreciate the simple, straightforward style that is easy to follow.
"...But if you are looking for a easy and interesting read, A House on Mango Street is a great choice." Read more
"...But, this book begs you to read between the lines. It's not haphazard, it's brilliant...." Read more
"...with the book, The House on Mango Street is very well written and very simple and short (which I like) it can be finished in one sitting or if you..." Read more
"...of her own journey: "She experiments, creating a text that is as succinct and flexible as poetry, snapping sentences into fragments so that the..." Read more
Customers find the book's characters engaging. They appreciate the author's authentic accent and unique way of describing people. The book portrays Chicanas and other minorities well, and it does a good job of capturing Hispanic culture.
"...I liked how the main character observes her life through the people that she meets and tries to figure out where she fits in...does she want to..." Read more
"...nice images and description to really bring the book and the characters to life...." Read more
"...The style of writing is so unique, and the characters are relatable and lovable...." Read more
"...founded, but I did think it was a little over done, portraying all men in abusive roles. I thought it was really interesting that in her..." Read more
Customers have different views on the book's short stories. Some find them engaging, with each vignette describing a separate situation. Others feel there is no clear storyline and that the chapters have different stories, making it confusing. The focus is not on Esperanza's story but on character development.
"...little gem made me cry, laugh, and feel closer to my family and my formative years. This book helped me find great appreciation for my younger years." Read more
"...the experiences of being an outsider are somewhat universal but not eternal...." Read more
"...The book is written in many short stories or vignettes of two to three pages rather than one long novel of chapters...." Read more
"I found the whole vignette thing rather confusing, seeing as they weren't exactly like chapters, but they weren't like completely separate stories..." Read more
Customers have different views on the book's length. Some find it nostalgic, with short chapters and a large impact. Others feel the stories are too short, lacking punctuation, and there are too many of them.
"...The House on Mango Street is very well written and very simple and short (which I like) it can be finished in one sitting or if you like to take..." Read more
"Even though it was a very short book, it was really hard to read to the end...." Read more
"This book, by a poet, is rightfully considered a classic. It is a short and simply written coming-of-age story, about a disadvantaged young girl,..." Read more
"...getting used to as the book is actually a series of vignettes, some very short, without standard punctuation...." Read more
Reviews with images
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The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is Timeless!
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2024I love this book. I do not know beans about the art of memoir, but this little gem made me cry, laugh, and feel closer to my family and my formative years. This book helped me find great appreciation for my younger years.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2018The House on Mango Street Book Review
The House on Mango Street, a coming of age book by Sandra Cisneros that takes you through years in the life of Esperanza Cordero, while she is living on Mango Street in Chicago, Illinois. The book is written in many short stories or vignettes of two to three pages rather than one long novel of chapters. You learn who Esperanza is as she is figuring herself out. Although the house on Mango Street is an improvement from past houses. Esperanza hopes for a better one in the future and feels like she does not belong there.
Esperanza has trouble defining herself. At the beginning of the book, she doesn't like her name and tries to defy everything she thinks she is “supposed” to be. Esperanza calls her name a “muddy color,” saying it means sadness and waiting. She was named after her great-grandmother, she had a life looking out the window. Esperanza had inherited her name but did not want to inherit the spot by the window.
Esperanza meets many people throughout the book. Mamacita, who never leaves her house because she is frightened of English. Cathy, who is the “queen of cats,” Meme Ortiz, the man who moved into Cathy’s house when she moved out, Sally her best friend, and Nenny her younger sister. All these people taught Esperanza lessons about life and helped shape the impact Mango Street had on her.
Throughout The House on Mango Street, Esperanza experiences a sexual awakening, in the beginning, she is very pure and will only interact with her brothers. But she witnesses her neighbors being abused and knows that she wants to get away from that. The “Monkey Garden” was a place felt safe and could be a kid, but that was then taken when some boys stole sally’s keys and made her kiss all of them to get them back. She then loses her innocence, after being raped by a man at the carnival when her friend Sally leaves her there.
In the end, Esperanza talks to Alicia, a girl studying in college, and Alicia tells her that even if you do not like the house on Mango Street you will come back to it, no matter how ashamed you are of it now. Esperanza vows that she will leave Mango Street but will come back to it for the neighbors and friends. She could never forget where she came from. Esperanza has changed through this book and went from being a kid to becoming a young adult.
I really enjoyed this book because it was an easy read, but there was a lot to take from it. The book gave me a new view on growing up in different neighborhoods, and the struggles others face that I do not. It teaches you what it is like to live life in a less desirable neighborhood. I would recommend this book to young readers or if you enjoy books about facing reality. The book was very touching and written in a unique way.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2025A novella and a coming of age tale that feels dated. Clearly the experiences of being an outsider are somewhat universal but not eternal. Our world and our cities have changed and describing the 1980s experience does not resonate 40 years later.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2025The preface is awesome.
The book: some pieces are much stronger than others.
If you love Mango, though... read her poetry!
I feel she is really a poet most of all.
Read My Wicked, Wicked Ways and Woman Without Shame.
The poetry is where it's at.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2023Positives: This book is considered a cultural classic so an informed person might like to take a look at it to see why. More books should be published that are actually written by teenage girls at the time they are teens so we can understand them better and perhaps help them. The vignettes do reflect some of Esperanza’s (now Sandra’s) actual experiences. Her relationship and ideas about boys and her Hispanic friends are especially interesting and worthwhile reading about.
Negatives: Obviously the narratives have been doctored, edited, and adjusted to speed sales and to make things more viable commercially. That detracts from our understanding of the real nature of her poverty, isolation, sexual coming of age, and abusive family relationships. The adjusted author wants us to feel good and she aims, at times, toward that goal depriving us of knowing the reality of growing up under the impoverished conditions of her youth. If things were so rosy on Mango Street, why was she so eager to escape? The other thing that bothers my sleep is that the author is so full of herself her ego often gets in the way of effective story telling. Almost everything is about her and there is no real understanding or even an attempt at understanding the others and their viewpoints. If you think my criticism of her solipsistic personality unjust, you haven’t read her 2009 introduction.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2025This product arrives super fast and my daughter was please with her book, thanks!
- Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2025Just what I asked for!
- Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2025expands cultural awareness
Top reviews from other countries
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Binho RbSoftReviewed in Brazil on January 3, 2025
5.0 out of 5 stars Não lembro, já faz tempo.
Mas o livro deve ter sido necessário e deve ter agradado...
- Ian C.Reviewed in Canada on February 26, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read
One of the most delightful, insightful and unique books written in the last 50 years.
- Cliente AmazonReviewed in Spain on February 1, 2025
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful
Beautiful
-
Winkler jeanneReviewed in France on November 28, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Répond à mes attentes
Parfait.
Parfait.
- PaulinaReviewed in the Netherlands on August 30, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars great
I like the way how the book is written, the plot is very sincere and involving