Her assessments of Sally ("all you wanted was to love. On the other hand, this woman-child can exhibit very mature insights. " - a very childish locution, for we know that Esperanza's feelings of liking and admiration for Alicia are not at all that simple. Very late in the book, she says of a neighbor, "I like Alicia because once she gave me a little leather purse with the word GUADALAJARA stitched on it. She jumps rope with her friends, rides three on a bike, is drawn to a good Bugs Bunny cartoon. On one hand, Esperanza is a typical young adolescent girl, at some moments a child and at some an adult. Some things about her we can never know, but because her voice is both direct and intimate, we can "know" her in some ways better than her friends and family do, better perhaps than she knows herself. All our information about her comes from her some things she tells us directly (and we must be alert to the possibility that they are perhaps true only at the moment she says them), others indirectly in her reported actions, thoughts, and feelings. Esperanza is the most fully developed character in the book.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |