This group of stories displays Cisneros’ great talent for voice. The reader is introduced to several beautifully sketched characters in a few short pages: the tired middle-aged woman trying to decide how best to spend ten dollars—all the money she has—on a devotional article; the lonely widower talking to a stranger in a laundromat; even the writer of a one-line prayer who has fallen in love with a man not her husband and humbly begs God for help. Each of these stories, sketches, and letters invites us to consider the life of its central character or characters and to participate imaginatively in its fiction.
We must read carefully in order to do so; like much poetry, these pieces are precisely wrought. Although they seem casual, un-self-conscious, even artless (in the sense that they seem to be the unplanned discourse of their speakers), every word in each story counts, adding its deft stroke to the characterization. The exception is “There Was a Man, There Was a Woman,” in which the parallel phrases and sentences very artfully delineate the loneliness of these two similar people. And loneliness is the thread that ties all of these stories together, along with human need and the dogged courage of the characters, who face their loneliness and hardships bravely, thankful for whatever they have and determined to make the best of what life has handed them.
