By Gennifer Choldenko
A boy's whole family moves onto Alcatraz Island in 1935 so his older sister, who is autistic, can try for a spot at a San Francisco school — years before autism had a name.
It's January 1935, and twelve-year-old Moose Flanagan has just moved to Alcatraz — the actual prison island — because his father took a job there to be near the Esther P. Marinoff School, which might take his sister Natalie. Everything in this family runs on Natalie. His father works two jobs and is never home. His mother has room in her head for one subject, and it isn't Moose. He loses the baseball he loves to the pull of it and gets handed his sister to mind instead, and he's furious in a way he's not allowed to say out loud. Natalie is sixteen. Their mother tells everyone she's ten, and has been saying ten for six years, because a children's school will take a child and nobody is going to fight for a disabled grown woman. Then the school says no anyway. Meanwhile Piper, the warden's daughter, works out that boys at school will pay real money to have their shirts washed by Al Capone, and Moose is the one who gets caught running her scheme. By the end he does the only thing left to him: he writes a letter to the most famous criminal in America and asks him for a favor for his sister.
Nobody in this book knows what's wrong with Natalie, because in 1935 nobody did, and that's exactly what makes it land for a brother or sister reading it. Moose has no word to hand people, no diagnosis to explain her, no school that will keep her, no mother with any attention left over. What he's got is the raw stuff of it: he loves her, she embarrasses him, he resents every single thing she's cost him, and he'd take on Al Capone for her. Choldenko wrote her own sister into this book, and it shows in the details you can't invent — the counting, the buttons, the way a whole family arranges its life around one person and calls that normal. The Alcatraz of it is what carries a reader through. They come for the gangsters and the shirt-washing scheme, and they leave having understood a boy who spent his whole childhood coming second.