Review Submitted by Luanne Oleas
Angela’s Ashes
Angela’s Ashes is available in:
HARDCOVER
AUDIO CD
Written (and read) By
Frank McCourt
‘Tis sure that only the Irish could take a childhood filled with lack, poverty, and drunkenness and make the world smile. Frank McCourt tells of his youth in the lanes of Limerick with a lyrical, lilting voice and a knack for detail that touches the heart.
The richness of the book is magnified in the author’s reading and singing of it. His voice gives life to the Irish accents, expressions, and songs. The author sings of Kevin Barry and Roddy McCauley, just as his father did after drinking the dole and rousing his toddler sons from sleep and making them promise to die for Ireland.
Who wouldn’t cry, a t’all a t’all, when he speak of the slight of the British, and “all they did to them for 800 years when they wouldn’t give you the stream of their piss?” Maybe just an Irishman, who, as his mother Angela insists, has his bladder near his eye.
Pinched between the typhus and the galloping consumption, is the anchor of the Catholic Church with whom “ruing the day” and “everlasting doom” were sure signs that God loved you. In fact, the reader takes solace in the book’s only flaw, McCourt’s inclination to dwell on his adolescent tendency toward masturbation or “interrupting himself with the excitement.” Surely the agonizing weekly confession of this impure deed was harsh enough payment for an editor’s oversight.
You laugh and cry for young Frankie, whether he is throwing up the Body of Christ in his grandmother’s backyard following his First Communion, or lying in a hospital ward and recalling the first time he heard the words of Shakespeare, who writes so beautifully that he, like McCourt, “must surely have been Irish.”
Angela’s Ashes
Angela’s Ashes is available in:
HARDCOVER
AUDIO CD
Written (and read) By
Frank McCourt
Related posts:
- Worst Fears
- Murdering Mr. Monti
- The Masterharper of Pern
- Here on Earth
- The Walking Drum
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Print This Post
This entry was posted
on Saturday, December 12th, 1998 at 12:01 am and is filed under Book Review, Holidays 1998.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Pammy, the main character in the 
Many of those 
Editor of The Blue Rose Bouquet since 1998 and a professional writer since 1984,