- Sue Kwong
This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout. The results of each contest will be published every Monday, along with an essay by each judge explaining his or her choice. The Reader reader who best predicts the judges’ rulings will win a trip to Mexico.
But Esperanza, even in the earliest chapters when she’s youngest, is a fully realized voice. She isn’t particularly precocious. She simply recounts her truth as she sees it, as she’s experiencing it. Sometimes siblings are just a burden to the life you think you should be leading. Sometimes you have to choose which people to make friends with—and Lucy and Rachel just seem more fun than Cathy. Sometimes the way pubescent girls learn about sex is damaging and confusing and yet still so matter-of-fact as to not even warrant discussion.
It’s ironic that Mango Street, the work of fiction, reads more like a stylized memoir, with the reader becoming more and more invested in young Esperanza’s tentative journey into adulthood (and Cisneros isn’t shy about owning up to the autobiographical elements). Each vignette in My Lives features a main character calling himself Aleksandar Hemon (or Sasha Hemon in his younger incarnations), but the versions presented in each work differ greatly as Hemon ages. He’s a man constantly evolving, just like we all are—or imagine ourselves to be. I found most of these men named Hemon interesting and able to tell a good story, but as I finished this book, I was simply glad I’d read it. I was relieved each person presented found some measure of peace after such horrific chaos. But I felt no compulsion to read it again and again.
