Week 8 Blog on Angela's Ashes

Boy, just when I was starting to think "how could life for this family get much worse?," it gets worse once they move to Ireland! They are greeted by grim relatives who are hardly willing to help them get settled, they move from one horrible apartment to the next, Malachy Sr. continues to drink away any income that is brought home, and two more kids die. And once Frank and Malachy Jr. are old enough to attend school, they are forced to endure the nastiest school masters, who seem more interested in whipping the students than in teaching them. It is amazing to me that the spirits of these surviving kids are not broken by all their hardships. Still, snippets of humor are woven among these sad, sad descriptions. I particularly enjoyed Malachy's reference to the horse dung (on the way to one of the funerals) as well as "going upstairs to Italy."

Also, I was upset when reading that Angela had ANOTHER baby. Instead of continuing to have kids that she can't properly care for, I wish she would have taken Frank and Malachy Jr. (there was a small gap of time when she had just the two kids!), left her basically good-for-nothing husband, and tried to find a job for herself, while the boys were in school. Who knows, she may even have had a better crack at finding work than her husband did, since she didn't have a drinking problem or that darned North-of-Ireland accent... I don't know which of the following is holding her back the most: the fact that women just didn't do that sort of thing at that time; the fact that Catholics don't approve of divorce; or her own weakness/ignorance. Whatever the reason, I am getting increasing annoyed by the paralysis of this family!