I will have to start by saying that Frank and I shared one common interest and that is that we spent our child hoods growing up in Ireland. I was in tears reading this very early on as the author describes so vividly the hunger and poverty combined with the loss of his three young siblings, but throughout the story Frank somehow depicts a sense of hope and trust in himself. I cannot pinpoint a particular passage that gave me this impression but somehow I could feel that Frank would leave the lanes of Limerick and pursue his own dreams and aspirations even though I felt he never really had a set goal he wanted to achieve but he knew there was something stirring inside of him.
His story is a very poignant one with some laughter along the way. It may also give an insight into what life was like in Ireland at that particular time. I feel Frank depicted very clearly from memory the heartbreak of the family of having an alcoholic father drifting randomly in and out of family life.
Although I feel at times throughout the book Frank may have served his tale better if he had of went into more detail about his Mother and her plight of hardship throughout his rearing from boy to young man making his way to America.
I also felt that at some points in the book Frank was tired; that maybe some detail he was describing was hazy in memory and maybe needed to reach the end to close a chapter for himself let alone the reader. It was a sad story he was telling but in a way also enjoyable to learn of the antics of being a wee scrapper in the lanes of Limerick. A good read but maybe a little bit more to draw the reader in would have been nice....
