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Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt, #1)

Frank McCourt

Start date: January 1, 2022

Finish date: January 31, 2022

Discussion: Monthly Book Suggestions

Why we're reading this: Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

Diversity Topic: Immigration Status…more
[close] Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

Diversity Topic: Immigration Status

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What Members Thought

Sep 17, 2012 Cheryl rated it it was amazing

Shelves: europe, pulitzers-nominees, mesmerizing, memoirs, global-intrigue

Frank McCourt does some interesting things with the creative nonfiction technique here. If you want to read about how poverty, starvation, malnutrition, and disease affects a child, read this book. What makes the book unique is how it encapsulated melancholy, but also leaves you entertained-- brilliant word-smithing. As a child, McCourt experiences so much death (including the death of his siblings) and abandonment, including that of his own father who is an alcoholic, yet still he manages to vi Frank McCourt does some interesting things with the creative nonfiction technique here. If you want to read about how poverty, starvation, malnutrition, and disease affects a child, read this book. What makes the book unique is how it encapsulated melancholy, but also leaves you entertained-- brilliant word-smithing. As a child, McCourt experiences so much death (including the death of his siblings) and abandonment, including that of his own father who is an alcoholic, yet still he manages to view a dimly lighted future afar. He is born in America but his family returns to Ireland, where he grows up in a poverty-stricken area where starvation becomes the norm. In the end, it is books, of course, that saves him mentally, giving him the option to return to America and start anew.

There is a way that McCourt has with style, something you don't see often in memoirs (no wonder this is a Pulitzer-winning-one), where he not only seemingly and nonchalantly gets the reader to inhale portions of extreme poverty in passages like this one, but he also makes the reader aware of the dire situation in the world around him:

I take the greasy newspaper from the floor. I lick the front page, which is all advertisements for films and dances in the city. I lick the headlines. I lick the great attacks of Patton and Montgomery in France and Germany. I lick the war in the Pacific. I lick the obituaries and the sad memorial poems, the sports pages, the market prices of eggs, butter and bacon. I suck the paper till there isn't a smidgen of grease.

If you don't like reading dialect in literature, you may not follow this well. Also, there is a lot about Catholicism (which I suppose McCourt had to do in order to show how it affected his life and environment, after all he was named after St. Francis of Assisi), so if that kind of thing turns you off, you could have difficulty reading.

No, said grandma. You're not making no collection till you've had a proper First Communion breakfast at my house...
I ate the egg, I ate the sausage, but when I reached for more sugar for my tea she slapped my hand away.
Go aisy with that sugar. It is a millionaire you think I am? An American? Is it bedecked in glitterin' jewelry you think I am? Smothered in fancy furs?
The food churned in my stomach. I gagged. I ran to her backyard and threw it all up. Out she came.
Look at what he did. Thrun up his First Communion breakfast. Thrun up the body and blood of Jesus. I have God in me backyard...
She pushed me into the confession box.
Now grandma says she has God in her backyard and what should she do...
The priest is like the First Confession priest.
Ah...ah...tell your grandmother to wash God away with a little water and for your penance say one Hail Mary and one Our Father."

This dialogue continues, because once he returns, grandma wants to know: "holy water or ordinary water?"

Humor also helps the pacing and shades of barrenness in this memoir. And, of course, characterization, for there are characters like Quasimodo, who, "before he leaves his house he always sticks his head out the door and tells the lane, 'here's me head, me arse is coming." This is not the easiest to understand at first, especially the beginning, but after reading it for the second and technically third time, it still reminds me that only a few memoirs manage to embody such novelty. ...more

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Sep 22, 2019 Amie's Book Reviews rated it it was amazing

An exemplary historic memoir about growing up in poverty

Filled with fascinating anecdotes and stories.

This is a memoir that should be read by everyone with a love for the written word.

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