Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
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Scribner
Just the Series: Frank Mccourt Memoirs   

Series and Publisher: Frank Mccourt Memoirs   

Annotation: In this extraordinary memoir, the author transforms the story of an Irish-Catholic childhood lived in poverty, misery, and despair into a mesmerizing tale filled with wit, love, and forgiveness.
Genre: [Biographies]
 
Reviews: 6
Catalog Number: #4432616
Format: Paperback
Teaching Materials: Search
Publisher: Scribner
Copyright Date: 1996
Edition Date: 2016 Release Date: 05/25/99
Pages: 363 pages
ISBN: 0-684-84267-X
ISBN 13: 978-0-684-84267-7
Dewey: 920
LCCN: 96005335
Dimensions: 22 cm.
Language: English
Reviews:
Starred Review ALA Booklist (Thu Apr 28 00:00:00 CDT 2022)

Starred Review Although the cover shows a young boy staring intently at the reader, this book is really about Henry Brown as an adult and a staggering decision he made to achieve freedom. Henry, born a slave, hears from his mother that leaves blowing in the wind "are torn from the trees like slave children are torn from their families." When his master grows ill, Henry hopes that he will be freed; instead, he is given to his master's son, and his life becomes worse. Eventually, Henry marries and has children; then his family is sold. With nothing left to lose, he asks a white abolitionist to pack him in a crate so he can be mailed to freedom. The journey is fraught with danger as he travels by train and then steamboat, but 27 hours later, he reaches Philadelphia. A brief author's note confirms the details of the story, but it's the dramatic artwork that brings the events emphatically to life. According to the flap copy, an antique lithograph of Brown inspired Nelson's paintings, which use crosshatched pencil lines layered with watercolors and oil paints. The technique adds a certain look of age to the art and also gives the pictures the heft they need to visualize Brown's life. Transcending technique is the humanity Nelson imbues in his characters, especially Brown and his mother r dream of freedom deferred, his amazingly achieved.

Kirkus Reviews

A powerful, exquisitely written debut, a recollection of the author's miserable childhood in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, during the Depression and WW II. McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930 but returned to Ireland with his family at the age of four. He describes, not without humor, scenes of hunger, illness, filth, and deprivation that would have given Dickens pause. His shiftless loquacious alcoholic father,'' Malachy, rarely worked; when he did he usually drank his wages, leaving his wife, Angela, to beg from local churches and charity organizations. McCourt remembers his little sister dying in his mother's arms. Then Oliver, one of the twins, got sick and died. McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was ten. As awful and neglectful as his father could be, there were also heartrendingly tender moments: Unable to pay for a doctor and fearful of losing yet another child when the youngest is almost suffocating from a cold, his father placeshis mouth on the little nose . . . sucking the bad stuff out of Michael's head.'' Malachy fled to do war work in England but failed to send any money home, leaving his wife and children, already living in squalor, to further fend for themselves. They stole and begged and tore wood from the walls to burn in the stove. Forced to move in with an abusive cousin, McCourt became aware that the man and his mother were having ``the excitement'' up there in their grubby loft. After taking a beating from the man, McCourt ran away to stay with an uncle and spent his teens alternating between petty crime and odd jobs. Eventually he made his way, once again, to America. An extraordinary work in every way. McCourt magically retrieves love, dignity, and humor from a childhood of hunger, loss, and pain. (First serial to the New Yorker; Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selections; author tour)"

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Starred Review ALA Booklist (Thu Apr 28 00:00:00 CDT 2022)
Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
New York Times Book Review
Pulitzer Prize
Wilson's High School Catalog
Word Count: 141,977
Reading Level: 5.9
Interest Level: 9+
Accelerated Reader: reading level: 5.9 / points: 23.0 / quiz: 19777 / grade: Upper Grades
Reading Counts!: reading level:10.5 / points:33.0 / quiz:Q49568
Lexile: 1110L
Guided Reading Level: X
Fountas & Pinnell: X

A Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland.

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

So begins the luminous 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 neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness.

Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.


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