A family memoir told in the voices of ancestors, House of Houses is about oppression and survival and sometimes triumph, as "any book about a Mexican American family must be." Mora's House of Houses is large, imagined, traditional, a refuge from the desert's heat, where the generations of her family, living and dead, mingle through the months of a single year.

The house in inhabited by Mora's father, Raul, the fighter who hit no one; her mother, Estela, the extrovert who in grade school chose to be a rainbow tulip for May Day since no one color was enough; Estela's mother, Amelia, the Mexican Cinderella, a red-haired orphan taken in by wealthy relatives.

Drawing on the magical realism that distinguishes the work of so many Latin American writers - from Garcia Marquez to Esquivel - Mora writes of the multicolored cloth that heals the women in her family and of her father's ability to turn himself into a bird. Great-grandmother Tomasa, in her nineties, leaves fruit behind her radio for the announcer she loves. And Mora's Aunt Chole, though legally blind, is the only one who sees The Virgin Mary when she appears in the garden.