Al Capone Shines My Shoes

Moose Flanagan is a good-natured 12-year-old growing up on Alcatraz in 1935, where his father works as a prison guard. With a youthful tone, Kirby Heyborne expertly delivers a full portrait of Moose and his emotions. These include his guilty relief that his autistic sister, Natalie, has left the island to attend a special needs school, his alternating attraction and infuriation with the pretty warden's daughter, and his palpable fear that Al Capone wants a favor in return for his having helped to get Natalie into the new school. Heyborne creates multiple convincing characters, including the vindictive Officer Darby Trixle; Moose's friend Jimmy, who prefers breeding flies to playing baseball, and Natalie, whose autism (a disorder not recognized in 1935) causes her to spin out of control in stressful moments. Heyborne doesn't miss a crucial detail. A.B. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

August 17, 2009
Choldenko's follow-up to her Newbery Honor novel Al Capone Does My Shirts
picks up where the first volume ended. It's August 1935 and 12-year-old narrator Moose Flanagan's autistic sister, Natalie, is headed to a boarding school for special needs children, promising an easier life for him and his parents (“We've been three people and an octopus all of my life, and now the octopus is gone”). But since Natalie's enrollment was secretly engineered by the prison's most notorious inmate, it's an ominous development when Moose finds a note in his laundry that reads “Your turn,” written in Capone's script. It takes another 100 pages for the tension to ratchet up, but fans of the first book will enjoy getting reacquainted; Piper, the warden's manipulative daughter, and Darby Trixle, a noxious guard, provide lots of conflict for good-natured Moose. The hourly count bell, carping gulls and rumble of the fog horn form a soundtrack that Moose calls “the ticking of our own island clock.” Ages 10–up.