A Limerick to sob for

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What an astonishing read! Frank has a charming narrative way. Unforced, straightforward and utterly engaging. He owns the reader.

And what a tale he has to tell. Poverty so desperate that even the commissioners handing out assistance to the poor are shocked at the conditions. Father drinks the dole money, children scavenge for lumps of coal, mother has to beg, the children are clad in rags.

Skeletons with ragged hair and rotting teeth, Frank and his surviving siblings somehow manage to exist on charity and rare employment in 1940s Limerick. This isn’t an action book, just a fairly straightforward coming of age memoir, but the honesty and immediacy sucks you right in. You are there, fainting with hunger and weak with cold, clinging to life in some pungent slum, where the sewage floods through the tumbledown hovel you call home, and the height of paradise is cold fish and chips scrounged from a drunken soldier.

The Irish patriotism, language and rain fill the pages. You almost have to wring it out after every chapter. If it’s not the waters of the Shannon, it’s the winter rain. Or the tears of the reader.

What a read!



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