short stories

This book is filled with family stories and history, complete with folkloric themes and songs. It made me remember my childhood and how my family used to and still does take family trips, especially driving from Chicago down to Mexico. Those are trips that bring back nostalgic memories to most Mexican Americans.

Cisneros pictures her family's life as a fotonovela, with drama, happiness, tragedies, and more. This book is based on her and her family's real life circumstances filled in with, as she says, "healthy lies."

I love Cisneros' writing because she brings you into the story, as if you are a part of the characters' living environment. The details are very explicit. An example of this is the apartments her family and uncles live in. Bits and pieces purchased at the flea market cover the walls. Furniture so big, that limits the space to walk in the rooms.

Being born in Chicago does not take away the satisfaction of her mixed background, Spanish and Mexican. She expresses the era and culture in each place, writing some history about the Original Maxwell Street flea market. Also with reference to the unique hand made rebozos and the Spanish conquering Mexico.

She is her father's favorite, his reina, and his cielo. Being the only daughter and the youngest after six brothers that only tease and bother her, she grows up looking like a big boy but keeps that little girl inside of her. I grew up with my younger brother fighting all the time and can relate with Lala. I felt sorry for her because her appearance of a boy was another thing to criticize her about. She listens and sees how everyone in her family fight, cries, laugh, and go crazy. I think that she endures by seeing how everyone in her family live with daily situations and how they act upon them.

If you want to read and learn about culture and history, love, issues that pertain to relatives, all of this with humor then you must read this book. I love the fact that coming from three nations they relate with each other no matter the circumstances. It shows the true significance of family.

Exhibiting a humor that is at once Mexican, American, and Mexican-American, Sandra Cisneros tells the story of an immigrant family that is as universal and yet particular as these stories are. Lala Reyes is the seventh child of the family and the only girl. They live in Chicago, where her dad and his two brothers run an upholstery shop. There are cousins (my favorites are three brothers named Elvis, Byron, and Aristotle), looong caravan-style car trips to Mexico City to visit the Awful Grandmother, and some snooping into the past by Lala.

The Awful Grandmother was once a girl called Soledad, whose father was a dyer of rebozos, the traditional Mexican shawl, and whose mother was renowned for her intricate knotting of the fringes. All that remains of their art in the family is a rebozo with unfinished fringes, a caramelo, a shawl dyed in stripes the colors of caramel, licorice, and vanilla which appears around the shoulders of generations of women.

The plot winds and circles, often ending up in surprising places. "Caramelo" is a long book, but it could have been longer--many of the minor characters are unfinished and there's a sense that Cisneros had such a wealth of stories to tell that she simply could not stuff them all between these covers. The writing is so bright and fine I would have been happy to spend another hundred pages with the Reyes family.

My sole quibble with "Caramelo" is the extensive use of Spanish words and phrases. If readers do not speak Mexican Spanish, will they miss the full flavor of the novel? Would we be as willing to accept a book peppered with this much Hungarian or French? I would hate to think that some readers would find this a turn-off and feel excluded from Sandra Cisneros' rich and delightful story.

I have to admit when I first started reading this book I thought the dialogue and narrating was, as another reviewer described, syrupy and, personally, mediocre. The problem is Cisneros translates many Spanish sayings literally- making them sound sappy and just plain strange. For instance her 'Aunty Light Skin' would be 'Tia Guerja', which to someone who is familiar with Mexican Spanish, would sound just fine. The translations took a while to get used to.... Uncle Fat Face, 'my life', 'my heaven', etc.. All familiar in Spanish but just don't translate well literally into English. However, the story is wonderful and will have you coming back for more! A very rich story of the Northern Mexican & Southern Mexican(the other side) experience, culture, and sometimes culture-clash. A very vivid depiction of a family 'caught between here and there'. The story extending back generations, revealing personal struggles, and a families' quest for upward mobility in a post-colonial world of 'dirty indians' and rich Spainards, and later in the complicated society of the U.S. I was surprised how quickly I read this one actually. You'll be sad the story has come to an end.