Angela's Ashes, Filled with on every page with Frank McCourt's great humour and compassion. This is an excellent book that bears all the marks of a classic.
The only thing I regret is not knowing about this book and Frank Mac Court before. The story is heart breaking but the way it's told is HILARIOUS!!! I couldn't put the book down! I would read on everywhere literally laughing out loud. His sense of humour is over the top. I laughed so bad when trying to picture what he was saying, which happened in every passage I read. I've never read a story this sad, yet very funny. Reading this book brought me so close to McCourt.
So begins the Pulitzer Prize winning 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 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 neighbours yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.
This book is written in such a beautiful way with such a free, powerful voice. I will have to read McCourt's other books now to see where they will take me.
Thank you for the wonderful story!
