I found the introduction filled with unintended ironies. Cisneros said she wanted to write a book that you could turn to any page and find it accessible. For one thing, she said she was "abandoning quotation marks to streamline the typography and make the page as simple and readable as possible." Really? Personally, as far as I'm concerned, punctuation marks are our friends. Quotation marks in the most economical way signal that we are reading a conversation, and through conventions such as alternating paragraphs tell us this is an exchange between two people. Conventions help readability. Lack of quotation marks tell us we're in literary fiction land of difficult, dense prose beloved of academics--not a readable story the ordinary reader will enjoy. In fact, it has become my policy if an author doesn't use quotation marks to shut the book and back away slowly.
Why didn't I do that? Because I read this was a celebrated book about the Hispanic-American experience. Cisneros is fairly close to me in age, like me grew up in a big city (Chicago rather than New York) and like me has a Latino background. (Mexican rather than Puerto Rican). In other words, I thought I might identify, recognize commonalities in our experiences that would give me insight into what is accidental and incidental in my family experience and what comes out of being Hispanic, or at least something that took me back to my childhood with my family.
But really, I didn't last long despite my resolutions--I just hated the book's structure and style so much. Cisnero also says in her introduction that when she wrote this she didn't realize she wasn't writing a novel since she hadn't heard of "story cycles." You know what? I still don't think what she wrote was a novel. Not remotely. A novel isn't any work you say it is within two covers. I doubt this is long enough for one. I'd be very surprised if it came to even 30,000 words. That's a novella at best--not a novel. But also a novel represents a certain structure, and I don't think a series of short linked prose poems about a character (Esperanza Cordro) cuts it. Many of the 45 chapters didn't even come to 150 words. (And people think James Patterson is terse!) The prose was rambling, repetitive, and to me, instead of coming across as genuine seemed--oh, the sort of pretentious artificial thing I've seen a thousand times among a certain left-wing literati of all kinds of ethnicities that to me seems the very opposite of "diverse" yet seems to define it among many. Yeah, I totally believe this is often assigned in schools. Maybe that accounts for its bestseller status. I didn't for a moment believe this was the first person voice of a young teen girl coming of age. (That it was written by someone attending an elite poetry workshop as told in the introduction? That I believe.)
So yeah, so not something I enjoyed or that matched the hype in the blurbs and back cover.
