What readers think of Angela's Ashes, plus links to write your own review.

great book! i would recommend it to anyone who loves books that make you feel like you are in the story!

McCourt created a masterpiece with Angela's Ashes. I felt as if I, too, were living in the lanes of of Limerick with only bread and tea. This book has been out for some time now and many had reccomened that I read it sooner, and now that I have I feel enlightened. I feel selfish for I have known no sorrow like Frank and his family,even though I feel as though I lived it with him. Thank you Frank McCourt for this story filled with humor and sadness and for making me realize how truly blessed I am.

Brilliant book, very moving however funny at the same time. great book would recomend it to any great book lover!

I loved this book! It was funny, sad, happy, and very touching all at the same time! I could never imagine having the life he had and having to grow up like Frank McCourt. It just goes to show how much we take for granted these days!

Wonderful book. very touching and unforgettable!!! i loved it!

it was a spetacular memoir

Angela's Ashes - A Memoir of a Childhood by Frank McCourt

Published by Harper Collins, 1996

Frank McCourt created a new genre of memoir when he wrote this book and its sequel 'Tis.

As he says himself "I wonder how I survived 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". Without doubt growing up in Ireland in the Forties and Fifties was not the most advantaged of childhoods. Frank McCourt was raised in the back lanes of Limerick in a time of poverty in Ireland. His family's poverty was worsened by his father's alcoholism.

McCourt is a very good storyteller and has a very good ability for catching the little personal faults that make his characters come alive on the page. His description of the deaths of his brothers and sister is depressingly lifelike. The responder can feel the desperate hopelessness of the grief-stricken mother and her grim anger and antipathy of her alcoholic husband. However, this is not a completely depressing book - the story is interrupted throughout with a cynical, black humor that can have you laughing at pitiful descriptions of grief and sadness.

It is McCourt's ability as a writer and his skill to bring to life the miserable, hypocritical society of Limerick in the Forties and expose the cruelties that existed in Ireland of that time, which brought the anger of modern, comfortable middle-class Ireland down round his head. Yes, he may have exaggerated and dramatized his story, but ask people of his time and they will admit that, yes certainly, Irish society at the time was cruel, unforgiving and judgmental.