Angela's Ashes: A Memoir

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.

"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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 09/05/1996
ISBN: 9780684874357
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.22lbs
Size: 9.56h x 6.34w x 1.16d
Award: Book Sense Book of the Year Award - Winner
Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Winner
Award: Pulitzer Prize - Winner

Review Citations: Library Journal Prepub Alert 05/01/1996 pg. 82
Publishers Weekly 07/01/1996 pg. 49
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/1996 pg. 951
Booklist 08/01/1996 pg. 1851
New York Times 09/15/1996 pg. 13
LJ Best Books of Year 01/01/1997 pg. 50
School Library Journal 06/01/1997 pg. 155
Library Journal 05/01/1996
Library Journal 08/01/1996
Entertainment Weekly 06/27/2008 pg. 102
Entertainment Weekly 07/31/2009 pg. 61

Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 19777 / Angela's Ashes
Reading Level: 5.9 / Interest Level: Upper Grade / Point Value: 23