Angela's Ashes

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"'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it's a fortnight since my last confession. I tell him the usual sins and then, I stole fish and chips from a drunken man.'

'Why, my child?'

'I was hungry, Father.'

'And why were you hungry?'

'There was nothing in my belly, Father.'

He says nothing and even though it's dark I know he's shaking his head. 'My dear child, why can't you go home and ask your mother for something?'

'Because she sent me out looking for my father in the pubs, Father, and I couldn't find him and she hasn't a scrap in the house because he's drinking the five pounds Grandpa sent from the North for the new baby and she's raging by the fire because I can't find my father.'

I wonder if this priest is asleep because he's very quiet till he says, 'My child, I sit here. I hear the sins of the poor. I assign the penance. I bestow absolution. I should be on my knees washing their feet. Do you understand me, my child?'

I tell him I do but I don't."

Angela's Ashes is simply and purely one of the most moving and beautiful books about abused and neglected children that you can read. Frank McCourt describes his childhood in America and Ireland with an extraordinary mixture of compassion and dispassion. He will show you how to stay emotionally open and completely honest at the same time, and how to describe conditions of neglect and abuse without dehumanizing the perpetrators or the victims. He will show you the universality of poverty, the power of love, and, most importantly, the resilience of the human spirit. He may even give you hope in the face of the terrible circumstances that you may see with your own CASA child.

—Libby Colman, Ph.D.