by Frank McCourt
A moving memoir of an impoverished childhood in Brooklyn and Limerick, Ireland.
Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
I loved this book though I didn’t expect to: I was put off by the poster images from the film they made of it, wary of what I feared would be a sentimental and weepy atmosphere.
It’s hard to grasp the unrelenting suffering that Frank McCourt and his family went through in the 1930’s in Brooklyn and even more when for an extended period they returned to Limerick where his mother’s family lived. Children are born and die as infants; months and years go by without enough to eat, with a constant growing hunger; priests and teachers do their best to punish initiative and kill aspiration and hope. Worst of all, Dad is a drinker, unable to keep from drinking away his wages in the pub every Friday night; when Frank is about 11, he slips out of the story, rarely to reappear.
The narrator tells the story in the first person present, recounting long passages of dialogue without quotation marks. He finds a uniformly believable voice in which to tell of a young man slowly coming to age in rough circumstances. We learn what a family eats when there’s absolutely nothing in the house, what a young boy thinks when his mother takes up with an unpleasant, grouchy man to ensure her sons have a roof over their head. There’s nothing sentimental about it: it’s riveting, moving, and funny. You’ll love it too.
Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Angela’s Ashes
Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003
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