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© 2000 Kathy Craig |
Angela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt
October 1997
Synopsis
"'When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.'
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy--exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling--does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story, Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.
Perhaps it is a story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors--yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.
'Angela's Ashes', imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic." (Publisher)
Reviews
- "I was moved and dazzled by the somber and lively beauty of this book; it is a story of survival and growth beyond all odds. A chronicle of surprising triumphs, written in language that is always itself triumphant." (Mary Gordon)
- "From the time we meet the embattled McCourts and their eldest son Frank, we are beset by the same tides of folly, passion, hilarity and loss that mark their lives. Once opened this brilliant and seductive book will not let you rest until Frank emerges, more or less reared, at the close of boyhood." (Thomas Keneally)
- "To be Irish or Irish-American of certain generations is to have known families like the McCourts--and curiously, to remember of them not the poverty, but the bitter wit, the sardonic inspiration, the wisdom from the corner of the mouth, the style that holds because it is laced with love of family." (Thomas Flanagan)
Book Club Rating and Comments
If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.
Other Books by Frank McCourt
- 'Tis'