Hello and welcome to Episode Nine of Page Turn: the Largo Public Library Podcast! I'm your host, Hannah. Today's Library Tidbit is a wellness tidbit. We know the Holidays can be very stressful. We hope today's tidbit helps.
The Spanish Language Book Review begins at 23:27 and ends at 27:20
The English Language Transcript can be found below
But as always we start with Reader's Advisory!
The Reader's Advisory for Episode Nine is A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. If you like A Suitable Boy you should also check out: Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry, Three-Martini Lunch by Suzanne Rindell, and White Mughals by William Dalrymple.
My personal favorite Goodreads list A Suitable Boy is on is Good Books for Knocking Out a Burglar.
Today’s Library Tidbit is wellness tidbit. The tidbit is a stress and anxiety reducing breathing exercise and a progressive muscle relaxation exercise. You can find the script I used here. We hope you find this useful and come back to it as needed throughout the month.
And now Book Traveler, with Victor:
We are sorry about the technical problems we had during recording.
Hi. Welcome to Book Traveler. My name is Victor and I am the Community Outreach Librarian here at the Largo Public Library. Today I'm going to talk about a fiction book we have in the Spanish collection titled "The House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros.
Synopsis:
"It's the 25th anniversary of The House on Mango Street, originally The House on Mango Street. about a young girl growing up in the Latin section of Chicago. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply happy, this novel represents a new American facet through its multiple characters."
Opinion:
This book was required reading in university and, although sometimes I do not like the required reading, this book has been the exception. Esperanza is a girl who moves with her family to a house on Mango Street. It is a little red house in a humble neighborhood, far from what Esperanza had expected when her parents promised her they would move to a house. Esperanza meets the other residents of Mango Street and describes her difficult life in a series of vignettes. The majority of the neighbors are Hispanic, like Esperanza, since her father is a Mexican immigrant and her mother is Latina who grew up in the United States. At the beginning, the book presents a series of characters and explores their cultural backgrounds and how they were affected by poverty, exile, and the restrictions of stereotyped gender roles.
Esperanza feels shame for the poverty of her family and describes several times in which she lies or tries to hide the fact that she is poor by saying that she lives in another house or hiding her ugly shoes at a party. Puberty also causes embarrassment to Esperanza, whose experience of adolescence becomes even more painful than normal after experiencing two episodes of sexual assault. One in which an old man forces her to kiss him and another in which two boys rape her in a carnival. Some of Esperanza's friends also suffer significant hardships: Alicia, who lost her mother, is forced by her father to get up early every morning and cook tortillas for the family; Sally, a beautiful school girl, endures daily beatings from her father; Minerva, a teenage mother of two children, suffers the blows of her husband.
Esperanza's mother encourages her not to let herself be held by men. When she witnesses the fate of her schoolmates who marry to escape the abuse of their parents and end up suffering the abuse of their new husbands, Esperanza decides to leave Mango Street with her books and writings. She dreams of having a house of her own where she can write. An encounter with three spiritual sisters at a neighborhood wake suggests that she will be successful in escaping, but that she will never be able to deny her past. The three sisters convince Esperanza that, when she leaves, she should come back to help those who can not leave so ea...
