Angela's Ashes

Book 57 of my 2018 Reading Challenge

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

Summary (via Goodreads)
"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 Pulitzer Prize winning 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. 

My Opinion
5 star read.  I bought it used and it had a beautiful inscription inside from one friend to another so that was an unrelated but nice start.

I was sucked right in although I learned not to read it right before bed after having some very bad dreams.

I know the times were very hard but the way the community helped each other and continued to give even when they didn't have much themselves was inspiring.  I think that still happens in other cultures but it is sorely lacking in the United States where the idea of "anything someone else has is something you could've kept for yourself" is the sad standard for those who control the budgets and make the big decisions. 

I missed the characters as soon as the book was over and look forward to reading 'Tis, the sequel to this book.

A Few Quotes from the Book 
"The master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live."

"Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace."