Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt • 1996
Devastation Rating
poverty family literary fiction historical loss
Our Take
Limerick poverty rendered as dark comedy and the comedy makes it worse. McCourt's childhood is unrelenting misfortune — the dead siblings, the drunk father, the mother's exhausted endurance — and the memoir survives its horror through prose that is somehow luminous. Ireland's shame and Frank's refusal to be ashamed of surviving it.
Appears In
► Poverty in Fiction — Stories From the Margins ► Homelessness and Displacement — The World That Passes By ► Irish Tragedy — The Island That Broke People and Kept Breaking ► The Great Depression — When the Economy Becomes a Catastrophe ► Homelessness and Poverty — What the Margins Look Like From Inside ► Famine and Hunger — The Politics of Who Eats ► Class and Wealth — The Cruelty of the Hierarchy
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