saby's Full Review: Frank McCourt - Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
Just a few weeks ago on vacation I finally had the time to do some reading. I purchased Angela's
Ashes at Borders because it was a an Award winning fiction and looked like a great story (which is what I look for in vacation reading).
Frank McCourt is a very engaging writer, and has written the story of his childhood in an extremely engaging manner so that often times you forget that this is a true story, and that everything that you read actually happened to the writer and his family. One of the fascinating things about this book is that it gives anyone an idea of what it was like to be an Irish immigrant in New York City at the beginning of this century. You get that feeling of how desperate people were to make the American Dream happen, yet how hard it was while living in the immigrant slum areas of New York City.
The more I read of this story, the more engaged and the more depressed I became. It seems like nothing can ever go right for the author and his family. His father is a severe alcoholic, and basically drags his entire family into severe and horrible poverty, as he spends any money that he makes on alcohol, and as he get fired from every job that he gets because of his alcoholism.
And because the story is told from the eyes of a child (the author as a small child) it is that much more depressing. The children in the McCourt family don't understand why their father is always acting the way he acts, and why their mother is always crying and upset with him. All that they know is that they never have enough to eat, and their father never has a job.
And just when you think that things are going to get better for the family- they don't. The McCourt family has 4 little boys, one right after the other. The father is never home and always drunk, and the mother tries to get enough food and clothes for the children- without money. Then they have a little baby girl which seems like the answer to their prayers. Father McCourt falls in love with this little baby and stops drinking. You get this feeling of relief, only to find out after 20 more pages that the baby girl dies, and the father slumps right back into his alcoholism.
But I kept reading on, hoping that things would improve. I kept thinking - come on this is a real story, it just can't get worse. And then it would. More children were born, more children dies. The father slumped farther and farther into alcoholism, the family got struck with all kinds of diseases, the children continued to die.
The more I read the more I wished that something happy would happen, and the more I wished that I had picked a cheery book for my vacation reading. BUT I did not put it down. I kept reading- hoping the situation would improve, turning page after page. And I finally reached the end of the book feeling relieved to be done with all the tragedy and all the depression, and again wishing I had picked a more cheerful story.
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