Little Miracles, Kept Promises | Literary Criticism & Book Review

Little Miracles, Kept Promises Critical Overview

With its sharp wit and poetic prose, its use of Spanish words and phrases, its female characters who question their traditional roles, and its focus on Mexican Americans and their impoverished place in society, "Little Miracles, Kept Promises" is characteristic of the stories in Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek. The book was hailed by critics as the work of a major new writer. The novelist Barbara Kingsolver commented in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that "[n]early every sentence contains an explosive sensory image." Kingsolver singled out "Little Miracles, Kept Promises" as her favorite story, calling it "a funny, caustic portrait of a society in transition that still pins its hopes on saints." Kingsolver brought attention to the last of the letters in which Rosario finds a way of accepting the Virgin of Guadalupe because of the Virgin's kinship with Aztec goddesses and other representatives of the divine: "It's a fine...
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