kindlereads's review against another edition
5.0
This book is excellent. Interesting format. Engaging story. It was full of sad events, children's deaths, a drunk father who eventually abandons them. But they survive if only that.
saintsappho's review against another edition
4.25
I rarely read nonfiction, and even less frequently do I read memoirs. I was expecting to have to endure this story, but to my surprise I greatly enjoyed it.
While McCourt's prose is simple and easy to follow, it still manages to be quite beautiful and even poetic at times. I was glad the author chose to write from a child's perspective, as it gave this very stark and harrowing story moments of wonder and commonality. It's a difficult story, and I was moved to tears by the family's struggles and losses, but the prose finds ways to lighten the mood and I found myself laughing out loud just as often.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author himself, and I think it made the story much richer.
I'm not sure I was enthralled enough to pick up the sequels, but I would highly recommend this read to others.
While McCourt's prose is simple and easy to follow, it still manages to be quite beautiful and even poetic at times. I was glad the author chose to write from a child's perspective, as it gave this very stark and harrowing story moments of wonder and commonality. It's a difficult story, and I was moved to tears by the family's struggles and losses, but the prose finds ways to lighten the mood and I found myself laughing out loud just as often.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author himself, and I think it made the story much richer.
I'm not sure I was enthralled enough to pick up the sequels, but I would highly recommend this read to others.
heatherh7's review against another edition
this book is so wordy and hard to follow. hard to get into. not for me.
lindageorge's review against another edition
5.0
I just finished listening to Frank McCourt read his memoir, Angela's Ashes. I loved this book. It was so sad and yet told with such humor that I could not help but laugh out loud. I will definitely listen to this again.
ablotial's review against another edition
5.0
Read this a loooooooong time ago (in middle school?), but I loved it at the time and recommended it to everyone and forced my mom to read it. I'll have to read this again someday to see if it holds up, but for now, the rating stands.
niktheghoul's review against another edition
This book is truly terrible. The lack of quotation marks makes it ten times harder for me personally and it feels very made up for a "memoir".
novelesque_life's review against another edition
5.0
4.5 STARS
"“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." (From Amazon)
A haunting memoir - heartwarming and heart breaking. The movie doesn't even touch the beauty of the book.
"“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." (From Amazon)
A haunting memoir - heartwarming and heart breaking. The movie doesn't even touch the beauty of the book.