"The House on Mango Street"

[Menelvagor]

Anyone want to redeem this book/short story for me? I've read "The House on Mango Street" (the individual story, not the whole collection) and I know it's popular and used a lot in high schools, but I can't really see what's so special about it. Cisneros has said that she writes "primarily to fill a gap" (that is, to provide a Chicano literature to represent Chicano immigrants and tell their story) but I can't find much value in her work outside of that. I want to find an interesting style (maybe a type of style representative of the gap she's filling?) or an interesting perspective, or something like that that's more descriptive than saying "she's an immigrant writer", but I havn't found it. Can someone help me and tell me why so many people read her? Is it just that I havn't read enough of her stuff? She also says that she tries to makes her stories short, precise, and almost poetic in their economy, and that they can stand alone or all together, but I don't see that executed particularly interestingly either, at least in "The House on Mango Street." Can anyone defend her to me? Show me what I'm missing?