I don’t think I loved this quite as much as Sarah did, but I definitely enjoyed it and felt my heart ache for Nat and Moose. Their parents were very full characters, too. I’d have liked the book to be longer, honestly—it felt like there was a lot more room for Piper to grow, for example, and I wouldn’t have said no to finding out more about Nat and 105.

This is an excellent book for older children (I read it with my 8 year old, and wouldn’t recommend it to children any younger than that; the narrator is 12, and that’s probably the target age). It started out a bit slow, I thought – the dialogue seemed a bit clunky at first, but once the story got going, wow, this was a really interesting book.

It’s set on Alcatraz Island in the 1930s, when it was a prison, and (as you might have guessed from the title), Al Capone was an inmate. The book really isn’t about the prison or Capone, though – it’s a coming-of-age story. First, about the narrator, 12-year-old Moose Flanagan, who has been torn away from his comfortable life in Santa Monica to live on Alcatraz, where his father had gotten a job as an electrician). The story also focuses on the growth of Moose’s autistic sister, Natalie; the reason for the family’s move to San Francisco is the hope that a special school there will help improve her development. Toss into the mix Moose starting at a new school, and all the other children living on the island as well, and there’s all sorts of interesting things happening throughout this book.

I really enjoyed this book, and so did my son (although I think it stressed him out, too – because of the setting, he was always thinking one of the children was going to get murdered by Al Capone). Interesting, and touching, and a good treatment of the family dynamic in a family that is under quite a bit of stress. 9/10