First Paragraph for Comparison Paper

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and The Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler by Juan Felipe Herrera are both realist novels with romantic writing in the form of prose, and vignettes. They are both also about the authors’ growing up in America in a Chicano community. The books have very different feels, Cisneros is very fluid, with each piece pertaining to the last in a drawn out, visual story of her life. Herrera on the other hand is eclectic, showing the actual chaos of his life through the chaos of his writing. Both of the books also have one thing in common, they are incredibly relevant to today’s society. The way that children with all types of ethnic backgrounds are feeling growing up in America in contemporary times is shown in both books even if it wasn’t exactly the same time period when the books were written. The feeling of being trapped is one felt by many children today, with all privileges and all types of cultures. The American society has a way of strangling a person in their world, making them a prisoner in their life. The books show this feeling through incredible descriptive words and ideas. Both House on Mango Street and Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler are wonderful literary pieces to explain life in America today, and to show the way that writing can be so different but show the same thing so well.