stephen_coulon 's review for:

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

3.0

dark reflective sad slow-paced

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It's the quintessential tale of poverty, misery, and childhood neglect. I love the TV series Derry Girls by Lisa McGee. If you’ve seen it you’ll remember the character Uncle Colm who infamously and incessantly drones on with his life’s anecdotes until his family is bored to literal tears. He must have been modeled after Frank McCourt. The content of the book is straightforward, a laundry list of nearly unimaginable wretchedness, suffering, and deprivation the author suffered growing up impoverished in Limerick, Ireland in the 1940s. Whatever the woes of poverty you can imagine, it’s way worse than that. Seriously, I’ve read quite a few of these sufferer’s journals and this one is almost cartoonishly excessive. Only it’s not that emotionally affecting, and that’s a problem with style. Firstly, the book is narrated entirely in a child’s voice, and children aren’t great at developing depth in storytelling or characterization. Playing into that McCourt’s technique in narrative is simply to move from one event to the next, to the next, to the next. It’s as if he tries to include every single childhood memory he could conjure without regard to how it might fit into an overall story arc. He never once slows down to fully develop a scene to allow it to make an emotional imprint. Nevertheless, the details of his childhood suffering are beyond harrowing, and he includes a good bit of humor from time to time too, though overall it's mainly a depressing slog. Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain does it better.