Remember those comforting old two-dimensional animated films in which visually simple characters moved around in front of a relatively vivid, richly-painted backdrop that never moved?

Yeah. That would be this book.

My three-star rating is an uneasy averaging of various warring opinions in my head. The overall setting and feel of Mango Street and its surrounding milieu are, as in those old cartoons, a backdrop that is vivid and well-executed, but generally just sits there in the background. That part of the book gets a solid four from me. The reader gets a strong sense of the neighborhood, and of the way Esperanza feels when she speaks of being tired of looking at things she can never have.

Characters and writing style collectively get a precarious two. Our cast, again like the visual simplicity of pre-Pixar animated characters, wander around and do their thing in a relatively two-dimensional and underdeveloped fashion. At first I attributed this to the vignette-style narration, which leaps around between characters so fast that it's difficult sometimes to keep them straight. Having finished the book, though, I realize that even Esperanza, our constant narrator, has failed capture my interest. When the book ended, I just thought, "Well, ok... but so what?"

My least favorite thing about this book was the writing style, which strove so self-consciously for innocence and youth that the struggle was painful to watch. I must try to be fair on this point; I think that this aspect of the writing was exacerbated by an appalling audio-book performance, so I kept trying to block out the sound of the narrator's voice and imagine the words as though I were reading them off the written page instead. A difficult task while I was in the middle of a shift at my job, but I did my best. I can definitely tell you that reading the physical book is the way to go in this case, but I still think the forced naivete of Esperanza would have driven me nuts even had I sat down and read it. Cisneros often uses metaphor and simile, and these are hit-and-miss; I thought the one about babies smelling "pink" was just short of brilliance, but a little while later she referred to someone's toes as being "little pink rosebuds." Human toes? Is she serious? I could not stop my eyes from rolling.

In all art forms - dancing, music, visual arts - the audience should see only the form, the motion, and/or the message of the art, and none of the effort behind it. This book is a whole lot of effort behind a thin message, a transparent copy of other writings that have done the same thing so much better. When I think about stories of young women coming through difficult circumstances in the search for their own identities, I think of The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, or of Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. Next to my years-old memories of these novels, The House on Mango Street feels like something I will have forgotten a month from now.

(Just a quick note about the audio book - I try to leave opinions that relate only to audio versions of books out of my reviews, generally speaking, but since I know a couple of my Goodreads friends also listen to books, I will say this. DO NOT bother with this audio book. My review for that version would be about half of a star, if that were possible. In addition to everything I've already said, the thing is read by the author in this insanely childlike voice that doubles her desperate need to write an Important and Profound novel about Innocence and Loss. That in itself is horrendous to listen to, but if you consider that deliberately tiny and girlish voice in light of the fact that the woman was fifty years old when this edition was released, it just becomes downright pathetic. If you absolutely have to read this book, read it. Don't listen.)