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Cover of Angela's Ashes

Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt

First published 1996 · 591 pages

A rain-soaked, tragicomic masterpiece of survival that finds poetry and dark humor in the depths of unimaginable deprivation.

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What it feels like

Reading this memoir feels like sitting in a damp, freezing room while a master storyteller warms you with the sheer brilliance of his voice. The atmosphere is undeniably bleak, steeped in the endless rain and crushing poverty of mid-century Ireland, yet the reading experience is anything but depressing. Instead, it is remarkably buoyant, carried by a child's innocent, unvarnished perspective and a distinctly Irish brand of dark, survivalist humor. The prose flows with a lyrical, almost musical cadence, pulling you steadily through episodes of heartbreaking neglect and profound loss without ever asking for your pity. It will deeply satisfy readers who love memoirs that mine the darkest corners of human endurance to find enduring resilience, forgiveness, and the saving grace of a well-told story.

Mood
  • rain-soaked
  • bleak
  • melancholic
  • resilient
Tone
  • wry
  • tragicomic
  • lyrical
  • unsentimental
  • forgiving
Pace
steady
Themes
crushing poverty · power of storytelling · childhood resilience · familial failure · religious guilt
The writing
Lyrical and rhythmic, flowing with the unpunctuated, conversational cadence of an Irish storyteller channeling a child's innocent, unvarnished gaze.
The arc
Moves from the suffocating despair of a destitute childhood through a series of heartbreaking losses, ultimately arriving at a place of hard-won independence and hopeful escape.
Who it's for
Readers who crave beautifully crafted memoirs that balance profound, tear-jerking tragedy with irrepressible dark humor.
Content notes
  • severe poverty and starvation
  • child death
  • alcoholism
  • child neglect
  • illness and disease

About the book

"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. in the 1930s and 40s. 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 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. - Jacket flap.

Description from Open Library.

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