The House on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros / 1984

Shoutout to all the Latinx writers who have yet to finish A House on Mango Street. I learned about this book in high school, even had my wonderful teacher Mrs. McCandless teach us a few passages from the book, even worked my way part of the way through it—then totally slept on it for more then ten years. I even attended Sandra Cisneros’ Macando retreat without having fully read it! (For the record, I’ve read a healthy amount of her other work and fallen deeply in love with it.) Usually when I find a book this magical, I get mad about the erasure of our literature from mainstream discourses and blah blah blah, but damn, with Mango Street I don’t event have the excuse.

Written in short flash fiction snapshots, Cisneros follows a Latina kid named Esperanza and tracks how working class neighborhoods like Mango Street defined her, frequently in limiting ways but ultimately in ways she appreciates. There’s a way these vignettes are sometimes portrayed as quaint or colorful in the interpretations of some of our teachers. The fact my teacher even suggested the book made me think it was safe and “positive.” I realize now that my teacher might have been trying to plant a seed, to give me a book to teach me a thing she couldn’t teach me about. My teachers didn’t share with the class and me the vignettes that more directly touched on gendered violence, sexual violence, and the degradations working class immigrant communities bear, even though they are critical aspects of the narrative, these so-called “adult” experiences we are not supposed to talk about with children.

I hold this book tenderly now, feeling foolish. Sometimes God puts a glass of water in front of us and we simply stare at it, complaining of our thirst, complaining of God’s cruelty. So much about this book is about power, autonomy, being able to forge a path beyond your circumstances, especially if you’re a young woman of color. Sandra Cisneros teaches us in the last chapter that the best way to love and honor a place sometimes is to leave it behind.

I recommend this book for everyone, but if you’re interested in Latinx lit, Feminist literature, or flash fiction, bump this to the top of your list. It will take you three hours to read if you’re slow. It’s the perfect book to read one chapter of each morning, letting the natural rhythms of your life to stretch out the narrative, so it feels like you’re almost moving at the exact same slow space of a child. But it’s mostly the perfect book for the morning, because the book focuses heavily on finding autonomy, freedom, an act that ultimately requires self-love, a self-love large and wide enough to sustain you when the world doesn’t.

Girls Lost / Jessica Schiefauer, trans. Saskia Vogel / 2011, trans 2020

Girls Lost / Jessica Schiefauer, trans. Saskia Vogel / 2011, trans. 2020

I bought this Swedish book for its queer and quizzical premise: three teenage girls and besties discover a plant that magically transforms them into teenage boys; while two of the girls use the plant recreationally for a bit, one of them gets addicted to the experience of masculinity, causing a riff in their relationship. The premise obviously steers into the territory of trans experiences and issues, but the thing is, I cannot find any evidence that the author is in fact LGBTQ+. I opened the book out of curiosity about how the experience of trading genders was managed. I kept reading because the translation is written in absolutely intoxicating, poetic prose. On average, the chapters are about 3-to-4 pages, making for a snappy and rewarding read. Schiefauer is boss at these flash fiction sized chapters.

Like most teenage stories, the logic of this one only works if you assume parents and teachers were somehow severely disconnected and not present in the teenagers’ worlds, yet somehow leading otherwise quite normal lives. The girls first experience the effects of this magical plant during a sleepover, but need to sneak out on subsequent nights to play with the plant. Schiefauer does an excellent job of capturing the exhilaration these girls must have felt, experiencing a man’s strength and lustfulness for the first times. Their social interactions with other young boys contrast immensely with their experiences in a female body: “We encountered boys. Made eye contact for a fraction of a second, then they sort of just looked past us, past our eyes. It was strange. No slick, slippery looks, no desire, no grins, nothing that crept under our skin and sank its teeth in.”

Despite being familiar with the impacts of toxic masculinity, Kim quickly falls in love with its embodiment in Tony, a young, but older man Kim befriends. Tony leads a small group of teens through rebellious activities: drinking booze and smoking, breaking into junkyards to rev up cars. The group follows a strict pecking order based on his discretion, where Kim competes for attention with other young men. Girls Lost ultimately rejects toxic masculinity once Tony crosses a line and Kim responds violently. Time gets really weird during the end of the novel, expanding and contracting, as Kim spends a number of years in hiding.

This is where the biggest critique of Girls Lost comes in: Girls Lost is written in a way that makes it seem like the author was unfamiliar with trans and queer community in ways that would have substantially changed the narrative. For example, after Kim ages, she never considers simply taking testosterone and it’s never even presented as an option. The young girls never find queer community and culture. Despite moments of homoeroticism between Tony and Kim, despite a strange heterosexual encounter between Bella and Kim, Girls Lost largely dodges discussions of LGBTQ+ community and how people felt about queer issues in their community. According to Wikipedia, Sweden is one of the most socially progressive countries in the European Union when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. I’m not sure how that translates to the queer communities lived experience, but this novel—which was a hit in the country—suggests that sexual and gender minority communities might still be woefully misunderstood or spoken over.

As harsh some of my critiques seem, this is one of the most fun books I read all year and I would absolutely love to teach it one day.

I recommend this book for those interested in YA, international literature, translation, and the representation of LGBTQ+ groups.

The Heart Keeps Faulty Time / Siân Griffiths / 2020

The Heart Keeps Faulty Time by Siân Griffiths is a perfect bedtime read, for those who need something to wind down in the evening or wind up in the morning. In this snappy collection of micro-fictions, Griffiths plays with magic and fantasy. Her stories will keep your imagination on edge with their sheer strangeness. Aliens, mermaids, dragons, and clowns abound. Some of these stories build up details slowly, as in “You Were Raised by a Dragon, What Was It Like?”, where the reader is bombarded with provocative questions detailing a child’s potential upbringing in a dragon’s nest. The exercise of creating a whole story out of questions was a fun, unexpected way of creating detail and possibility.

A lot of my favorite flash fictions stick with me because of an emotional note they manage to nail or a concept they skillfully unravel. There’s a sort of breathlessness a great piece of flash fiction leaves me with, because they are charged with creating an emotional stirring in so few words, so quickly. The story that most successfully shifted the matter inside me is “Everyone Fails.” The story is about a female superhero who is passed over by a superhero agency, not because she isn’t talented or skilled, but because she fails to perform the femininity and stereotypes of a female superhero. Maybe I liked it because the character is easy to relate to, what with her naivete crushed by the cold injustice of the world. There’s something very endearing about her idealism and her desire for the world to be meritocracy.

Perhaps my greatest criticism of the collection is that the some of these stories, though polished and well-written, feel like exercises, as if they were born from writing prompts, which according to Griffiths herself, some of them were. However, even in the stories that may feel like they are lacking an emotional core or concept to resonate from, there’s always enough details to make the experience of reading tactile and impressive. Take “The Persistence of Geese,” a strange story about waking up attached to a goose and needing to go to the butcher's shop to get it chopped off your body. Written in four short paragraphs, it’s vivid and descriptive, even if it doesn’t seem to reach for a greater meaning.

I recommend this book to folks, especially writers, interested in micro-fiction or Utah writers.