Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt

"I had heard about it. Frank McCourt's - I'd heard about the movie; and it had to do with Irish history, and I knew it was a memoir - and I love history. So my mom's Irish, her whole family's Irish, so I just really wanted to read about the history of Ireland back when my grandparents would have been there.

The story is about Frank McCourt. He was born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Irish immigrant parents; and when he was about four, they moved him and his then two younger brothers back to Ireland because they couldn't afford to live in Brooklyn. They were very poor. It was about his life growing up in Limerick, Ireland.

He takes a very sad story and makes it happy. I don't think of it as a sad story at all, even though people are - when I tell them I've read the book - "Oh, it's so depressing!" No, it's not depressing at all. I mean, if you think about the story, it is; but the way he writes it in that typical Irish storyteller charm, it's very, very, very moving. His father had run off all the time 'cause he was an alcoholic, and that wasn't my situation, but you just - single mother trying to make ends meet, that's pretty much how I can relate to it.

I liked everything about it. I liked the way it was written, I liked the characters, I liked the way he described them and whether it was a good situation or a bad situation. Anybody who's a history buff, anybody who likes knowing that something is real that they're reading on paper. I would give this book five stars. It just teaches you about yourself, I think, a little bit."

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