The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

This book is on the 2013-2014 BOB list, and I gave it a rating of three out of five. It follows the life of Esperanza Cordero as her family moves from an apartment into a rundown neighborhood. The house isn't what she expected, she doesn't really have any good friends, and there are people with questionable characters living nearby. Esperanza gains some control in her life as she gets older, and she hopes to overcome the challenges in her neighborhood to create a better life.

In the introduction, the author stated that she thought this book would become a memoir, but it didn't. It doesn't really have a flowing plot; each chapter describes a different event, place, or character. A strength of the book is the poetic flow of words the author uses to describe things. There are many types of figurative and sensory language as she paints a picture of her life on Mango Street.