The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. It’s earnest Moose, always striving to do the right thing, who elevates this tale, like a hard-hit baseball, into the stratosphere. Even secondary characters are full of life, inspiring empathy, and the never-demeaning depiction of Natalie’s emerging maturity is particularly notable. Although the Al Capone books were intended as a trilogy, this welcome fourth volume gives Moose the opportunity to help launch Nat into a hopeful future. When a guard’s ambitious wife lures far-too-trusting Natalie into the prison, the tale goes from suspenseful to desperate as Moose struggles to rescue her. These conflicts and more threaten to crush Moose under their combined weight as they’re deftly recounted in his attractive and always believable first-person narrative. Among them are: his 17-year-old autistic sister Natalie’s growing awareness of her own sexuality warden’s daughter and perennial thorn-in-his-side Piper’s predilection for causing trouble in spite of his best efforts his passionate hunger to make the high school baseball team and a prison strike that could spell the death sentence for Fastball, a good-natured prisoner who’s up for parole. Most people’s lives (and the best books) have more than one plotline.Īs in Choldenko’s first three books set on Alcatraz Island during the mid-1930s, ( Al Capone Does My Shirts, 2004, etc.), Moose, 13, has plenty of issues to handle.

Gennifer choldenko al capone series