Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories

A quest for identity and discovery cloaked in magical writing and bilingual rhetoric. I have been meaning to read this collection of stories ever since I read “The House on Mango Street” back in high school. And back then, I didn't have much of an appreciation for it. I found it confusing and wasn't willing to put in the work to understand. With this, I took my time, tapped into my own bilingual brain, and found a semblance of comfort, laughter, and sadness at the stories in here.

One of the best things about Sandra Cisneros' writing is the fact that you don't have to be bilingual yourself in order to understand. She crafts through context clues and graceful inserted translations a method of comprehension for those who don't speak Spanish. Her descriptors are sharp, sentences are short, each story is less a “story written” and more a “tale told.” It's a snippet into people's lives, it's evocative with the senses. When I reached the story with the title's namesake, I was particularly quite excited to see why she chose it as the name of the collection — and was not disappointed.

Although House on Mango Street is the one that most have read first in my experience, I would recommend this collection as your first exposure to her writing. The stories are various lengths, and about various characters and things, and will provide more of a sense of success in finishing one even if it's just one page. There are so many lines I could quote. But then this review would tangle.

Maravilloso, este libro me hace sentir emocional. No puedo recomendarlo bastante. Para las audiencias hispanohablantes o “ingles”hablantes, es una aventura.

I loved The House on Mango Street
and very much wanted to read more
of this author. The quality of
the stories varied wildly, from
excellent to poor. Even the
weakest stories, however, are
very successful in presenting
a Hispanic-American viewpoint,
a viewpoint that I have rarely
seen in print and one that is
needed in my part of the world.