Angela's Ashes

I started this book during last Christmas break and finally finished it in mid July. I kind of had to force myself through the beginning, but that's typical for me with most books I think.  I wish I could get through books in better time, but I typically don't feel like I have the free time to enjoy books properly....so I get through them as I can.  Next up is A Brave New World.

For the last many years, I have really loved every book I read and added them to my books list on fb (giving away about how much I read here).  I really enjoyed Angela's Ashes, but I don't feel the necessity of adding it.  Once I got into the book, I didn't want to put it down, but I felt like it was out of a need to get to a happier next page.

Angela's Ashes, which has a movie too that I haven't seen, is a memoir about a boy born in the 30s in Brooklyn to Irish immigrants who decide to move back to Ireland when he is a toddler because of their poverty.  Sure enough, Ireland was not in the least doing better than America in the 1930s.  The story is about the family's bare-to-bone poverty, encounters with illness and death, and hopelessness of being supported by an alcoholic father who cannot keep a job and eventually abandons the family.  I may have laughed a few times, cried once, but probably looked like this most of the time reading:

I picked the book because my Mom had it when I was younger and it was still a best seller (published 1998) and I think the cover and title always made me curious.  When I started it, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it fit a theme I've found to really enjoy- industrial revolution-->pre-WWII era and focusing on every day life.  I probably like those themes because I'm in to the romanticism hipster trend, I love history/old things in general, and because of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Anne Frank, others...

Things that I liked:
Frank McCourt apparently has a fantastic memory of the thought content of his younger years.  He constantly wrote from the point-of-view of his age at the time of the story.
His descriptions of his family members were so loving and authentic, especially his parents.  He would take special care to depict them in the way he saw them as a child, not skewed by adult realizations of their common humanity.  Even his father, who ended up leaving the family when he was 12, was never depicted as a bad man.  Just a man of constant disappointment, who the family would not give up on no matter how hopeless he was.
His childhood perceptions on the adult values and morality he grew up within.  He grew up a truely devout Catholic- which he discusses extensively.  However, he points out in a non-skeptical fashion the hypocrisy and biases of his church and the values pressed so stiffly to him and his peers.  In the end, rather oddly, he suddenly seems to turn against all of it the night he arrives in America... 

The ending may be my only criticism...it was abrupt and surprising, and suddenly showed a new vulgarity after what had been largely innocent recollection of everything from sex and adultery to the deaths of his classmates.  But in a way it was appropriate.  As it was his introduction to America- it could be considered his tone to an entrance into what is the essence of America...his introduction to his perception of freedom.  He went from what sounded like late 18th century life to the 1940s in America...

If you have more time than me and are into history, memoirs, stories of courage...totally recommend.