Living Up The Street

Soto, Gary. Living up the Street. New York, New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, 1985.

In Living up the Street, Gary Soto shares with his readers narrative recollections from his childhood. Published with Bantam Doubleday Dell Books in 1985, Soto reminisces upon different childhood memories, ranging from innocent fights on the playground to early encounters of racism that are vividly illustrated throughout the text. The readers grow up with Soto as the book progresses and are really able to get a feel for the type of childhood he encountered in his hometown of Fresno, California. This book accurately depicts the hardships that many Mexican-American families had to deal with during this time period. 

After reading this novel, I do not think it would be a valuable piece of literature to teach in a Multicultural Adolescent Literature unit in a middle school environment.  The major theme of American identity and what exactly it means to be American is a very important concept and is a very relatable theme in a diverse classroom. However, Soto references this theme with playful childhood encounters that are many times lost in translation.    The reader never really gets the sense to how serious and meaningful the 9-year old narrator's comments are, and I think that makes this novel hard to relate to.  Also, the format of short narrative stories that have no connection to other parts of the novel allows more of a gap between the reader and the story, which doesn't captivate the reader to continue on to the next chapter.