The message that I got from this book is: You may not feel you belong but you do belong and you don’t give up until you escape and go where you belong.

This book was written for the once who "cannot get out". What I’m trying to say is that for those who want to escape but can’t.

I think that the author was successful getting the message across because now people can see and learn from her mistake and so they would not make the same mistake that she did. Now people know that if you feel like you aren’t comfortable with where you live or with whom you are, you should escape from it and go where you think you belong.

The book THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET was a very hard book to understand. The only reason it was very hard to understand is because the author had chosen to break perceived rules of grammar. For example, " For the once who cannot out." It was hard for me to get the idea that she is talking about. I also think that this story was hard for me to understand because it was a novel story but it was broken into little short stories, which built the whole story. It was hard to understand because you really had to be careful when you were reading the story so you can know what was the author trying to say. This was the bad point that I think about the story.

However, the story wasn’t that bad when you actually understood. It was really interesting because you can know now what the character went through. It was actually a little bit sad because she was talking about the bad things that had happened to her. She had talked about how she hates herself and where she lives. For example the author states, "We did not always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can’t remember." As you can see that poor girl was so tired of moving from one place to another. She wanted to live her normal life but she couldn’t because they were not as rich as others were. Even though she hated where she lived, she could not escape because she had nowhere to go. It also was sad and painful the way she hated herself. She said that she hates her name "Esperanza." She said that she wishes she can be somebody else. It was kind of sad because she said bad things about her. The same thing with the "Hair," she hated her hair because her "hair is lazy." Everything in the story was about her bad life. She was very unhappy with her life. She wanted to live in a real house that would be theirs for always so they wouldn’t have to move each year. "Inside it would have real stairs, not hallway stairs, but stairs inside like the houses on TV" Therefore she wasn’t happy with where she lived. In addition aunt Lupe tells Esperanza that writing "will keep you free." It meant that writing something like for example a poem express your feeling and you can get it out of your mind. This way as you can see you can feel free and you escape this way from your mistakes you made and from the place that you don’t want to belong. Esperanza like to tell stories. She makes a story for her life. The book states "I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoe takes. I say, and so she trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked." As you can see writing something the way she live it helps her to get away from the bad things. "I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free." This quote that I took from the book supports my opinion because the author is saying that writing doesn’t keep you and it doesn’t make you feel bad but it help you to escape from the bad things. It helped Esperenza to escape from the place that she didn’t belong.

I think that that story really was a good story because it showed a person’s feelings. It actually showed how someone was poor but she didn’t give up and she kept writing. This way it helped her to escape from the bad times. I liked this story and I would love to read more stories that were written by Sandra Cisneros. I read already two stories written by her. One story that I read was "Eleven," it was actually a memoir that Sandra wrote for us. That memoir was sad too. I like the way she is writing stories. They seem to me very true. The story "Eleven" I read in Ms. Huck’s class. Almost everybody in the class liked that story.

This novel helped me with improving my writing skills and my reading skills. I read this novel five times and even though I don’t like to read, I knew that I have to read to understand the novel so I can do my report. Right now I am so happy that I read this story and I feel like reading one more because this is the only way my English language improved. I think that I understand more English since I had been in Ms. Huck’s class. I am very happy and I am grateful to my understanding teacher Ms. Huck. She is a wonderful teacher.