We chose The House on Mango Street (HOMS) because it combines rich, lyrical, yet accessible language with narrative and a protagonist with whom students can identify. That makes HOMS an ideal unit for close reading. It is important that students learn to be slow, careful readers who can peel back many layers of meaning in a text. HOMS rewards that kind of persistence and patience. For that reason, we will return to vignettes more than once, on each occasion conducting new analysis and finding more in the text.