Review by Choice Review
Acclaimed Chicana author Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own collects nonfiction essays spanning the years from 1984 to 2014. In these she reflects on her childhood in Chicago and her emerging literary voice as a Mexican American woman writer while studying for her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Throughout her career, Cisnero writes in her introduction, she "passed through a lot of houses, loves, and typewriters, never quite finding the right one." Eventually she followed literary predecessor Virginia Woolf's advice by claiming, as she says in the title story, "a space all my own just to write"--first in San Antonio, Texas, in her "casa rosada," and later in San Miguel de los Chichimecas, Mexico. Cisneros's narrative and poetic brilliance is developed through memory: she "cut[s] apart and stitch[es] together events to tailor a story, to give it shape ... because real-life stories rarely come to [one] complete." Cisneros's expertise at crafting fiction and poetry derives from her power of finding "just enough" right words, a skill that has made her the female voice of la raza for her generation Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Shelli Lynn Rottschafer, Aquinas College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* By gathering together more than 40 essays and musings written for various occasions and undertakings between 1984 and 2014, Cisneros, beloved author of the novels The House on Mango Street (1984) and Caramelo (2002), has created her first work of nonfiction, a patchwork-quilt memoir resplendent with one hundred color photographs. Her reflections on houses she's lived in and the meaning of home form a unifying motif, along with accounts of her early struggle to envision a way forward as a self-described American Mexican and working-class writer. Cisneros chronicles with profound insights and striking detail family abodes in Chicago and Mexico City, sojourns on a Greek island and in Sarajevo, Venice, and Chiapas, Mexico, and the uproar over her purple house in San Antonio. Cisneros pays passionate homage to her parents and such writers and artists as Gwendolyn Brooks, Elena Poniatowska, Eduardo Galeano, and Astor Piazzolla. She also examines with abrading candor and impish wit gender expectations, sexuality, and her long campaign to become a woman comfortable in her skin, the corollary to her love of home as sanctuary: A house for me is the freedom to be. At once righteously irreverent and deeply compassionate, Cisneros writes frankly and tenderly of independence and connection, injustice and transcendence, resilience and creativity, the meaning of home and the writer's calling. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Cisneros will tour the country with this mosaic of autobiographical stories guaranteed to enthrall her many fans.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Cisneros, a MacArthur Fellow and two-time NEA grant recipient, has felt one constant emotion throughout her life: a hunger for a place that belongs to her, a place where she is free. In her lyrical, warm, and richly detailed account, Cisneros writes of her nomadic family. She, her parents, and her six brothers only find some sense of permanence during regular visits to her paternal grandparents in Mexico City. It isn't until she's an adolescent that they get their first real home in Chicago, which inspires her most famous novel, The House on Mango Street. But when given the chance, she flees in the early 1970s from the old-world, marriage-minded patriarchy of her father's home for university and an M.F.A. Then, with the half-finished Mango manuscript in tow, she leaves the country for the first time, at 28. She lands in Greece and finds her first home of her own, a house where she writes in the garden looking out over the mountains. Many years on, it "holds a dazzling place in my memory." Like many artists, Cisneros often lives as an itinerant; as a Mexican-American from "Chicano, Illinois," she toggles between two metaphorical worlds. Settling in San Antonio, she wears tunics, the same style worn by the servants her Mexican relatives employ, and declares, "This cloth is the flag of who I am." Now in her 60s, Cisneros vividly evokes the many stages of her life and the places she's been. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Cisneros's Chicago upbringing provided the background for her award-winning 1984 novel The House on Mango Street. This memoir comprises essays and the transcripts of speeches written over 35 years. The pieces are like the rooms in a house-each can be considered by itself, but they are connected by doorways and hallways, furnished with the events and people from particular times. Cisneros writes about the places she has lived, including Chicago, Iowa, Massachusetts, Greece, Bosnia, San Antonio, and ultimately Mexico City, where she now lives in the titular house of her own. Cisneros lovingly describes her Mexican-born father and American-born mother, who protect her, their only daughter, and who are eventually proud of her literary accomplishments. She talks of Mexican American culture, women's roles, and the often-lonely life of a writer. She narrates the audio edition herself; her pacing and pitch are ideal. Unfortunately, the photos in the print edition are unavailable. VERDICT Highly recommended for public, high school, and academic libraries. ["Cisneros blends family stories from Chicago and Mexico with lively storytelling, rich details, and good humor": LJ 9/1/15 starred review of the Knopf hc.]-Nann Blaine Hilyard, formerly with Zion-Benton P.L., IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The making of a Latina writer. Award-winning novelist, poet, and MacArthur Fellow Cisneros (Have You Seen Marie?, 2012, etc.) describes her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), as a series of discrete vignettes that could be read as a whole "to tell one big storylike beads in a necklace." That description is apt, as well, for this warm, gently told memoir assembled from essays, talks, tributes to artists and writers, introductions, and poems, most previously published over the last several decades. "I am the only daughter in a family of six sons. That explains everything," Cisneros once wrote as a contributor's note. But she admits her identity has been shaped, as well, by her proud, stern Mexican father, "intelligent, self-taught" Mexican-American mother, and by her childhood in working-class Chicago. Although she exalts in her identity as a Latina, she realized on a trip to Mexico, when she was 30, that like other "naive American children of immigrants," she was "filled with nostalgia for an imaginary countryone that exists only in images borrowed from art galleries and old Mexican movies." Cisneros chronicles the creation of her first novel, begun in graduate school at the University of Iowa, when she was 22, and completed on the Greek island of Hydra in a whitewashed house with "thick walls, gentle lines, and rounded corners, as if carved from feta cheese." Homes feature in many pieces: the apartments her family moved into, always looking for cheaper rent; the house they finally bought, where the author had a closet-sized bedroom; her house in San Antonio that she painted purple, raising objections from the city's Historic and Design Review Commission. Besides reflecting on her writing, Cisneros discloses a period of severe, suicidal depression when she was 33; a tantalizing family secret; and eulogies for her parents. A charming, tender memoir from an acclaimed Mexican-American author. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
