"Angela's Ashes"
by Frank McCourt

A review by Mary Reedy

"Angela's Ashes," the highly acclaimed and successful bestseller, will be in theatres nationwide January 21, and though reviewers raved about Frank McCourt's first effort, I found it a bleak, barren and disturbing story.
This is the tale of McCourt's miserable childhood in damp, gray Limerick, Ireland. Born in New York during the Depression, McCourt moved to Limerick at age five with his mother, Angela, his father and four younger siblings.
If life was bad for the McCourt clan in Brooklyn, moving to Limerick was going from the pan to the fire.
McCourt's father, Malachy, was blessed with a silver tongue and a taste for "the drink." His addiction damned his family to live in unimaginable poverty as he drank away his occasional wages.
Frank McCourt tells a story of growing up in abject poverty, and recounts a life of hand-outs and charity. It is so bad that his hospital stay when he was sick with typhoid seemed like a vacation to him.
Angela clothed her family in rags and fed them with food that she begged from churches. Her life was horrific, and her young babies died off one-by-one while the others watch and starve.
McCourt is deeply ashamed when he sees his mother waiting at the priest's door for scraps begging for food, and dinner that night at the McCourt's was a large hunk of fat from a corned beef.
McCourt's innate humor percolates throughout the book, and his engaging style makes the book an effortless read. You'll laugh out loud when he tells about his First Communion Day, when his grandmother berates him for leaving Jesus in her backyard.
McCourt writes with a lyrical style that draws the reader into his Limerick childhood, and his descriptions of the city will make you shiver with the cold and damp, as you laugh and cry as the McCourts sink ever deeper into despair.
What makes the story so disturbing is that Angela's sufferings never cease. For her there is no hope, no redemption, no happiness.
At the end of "Angela's Ashes," Frank McCourt returns to New York and the question is asked, "Isn't this a great country altogether?" And his next book and sequel provides the answer: "'Tis."

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"Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt

"Angela's Ashes"
by Frank McCourt