Al Capone Shines My Shoes

Content Warning: This section of the guide represents ableist attitudes and language present in the source text, which are replicated in direct quotes only.

“Nothing is the way it’s supposed to be when you live on an island with a billion birds, a ton of bird crap, a few dozen rifles, machine guns, and automatics, and 278 of America’s worst criminals—‘the cream of the criminal crop’ as one of our felons likes to say.”

The novel’s first sentence sets the scene and tone for Choldenko’s story, with its slang and its child’s eye view of disorientation and danger in strange, relatively new surroundings. Seven months earlier—as described in the first book in the series—12-year-old Moose Flanagan relocated with his family to the prison island of Alcatraz, when his father found work there as an electrician and guard. Alcatraz’s bleak, isolated setting makes it the optimal last stop for the country’s hard-case convicts; but the children who must live there often feel imprisoned as well.

“But out of desperation, I sent a letter asking Capone for help and Natalie got accepted. Then I got a note in the pocket of my newly laundered shirt: Done, it said.”

In the series’ first book, Moose confronts The Dangers of Moral Compromises: To get his neurodivergent sister Natalie into a special school that represents her best hope for the future, he asks one of the island’s convicts, the notorious mobster Al Capone, for help. Shortly afterward, the school unexpectedly accepts her, and Capone implies with his note that he is responsible. Moose knows that a man like Capone seldom does favors for free.