'Al Capone' Returns to Alcatraz

Writer Says She Had More Stories to Tell About Boy Growing Up on the Prison Island

"Anytime you write a book, kids want a sequel," said Gennifer Choldenko, author of the award-winning 2004 novel "Al Capone Does My Shirts." But Choldenko was worried about producing a second book featuring Moose, the 12-year-old son of a prison warden growing up on Alcatraz, the famous island prison in San Francisco Bay. She remembers, as a kid herself, being so excited to read the sequel to her favorite book, "Harriet the Spy," and then hating it when it came out. "I was furious," she said.

So she thought long and hard before writing a sequel. "You have to ask yourself, 'Is there a real reason to have a sequel, or is it just because kids want it?' "

Choldenko decided she had more stories to tell about Moose and life on Alcatraz, which for a few decades was home to some of the world's most famous criminals and also to the families of prison employees. Last month she published "Al Capone Shines My Shoes," set in 1935, in which the affable Moose gets even further drawn into life with the residents of Alcatraz -- those behind bars and those not.

Choldenko has written several children's books. As historical novels her Alcatraz books required a tremendous amount of research on what life was like on the island. For the first book, she even volunteered at the Alcatraz museum to help gather information. She could do that because she lives in San Francisco with her husband, 15-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter.

The details Choldenko gathered from this research helped create a realistic picture of life on the island. As characters, she used real Alactraz prisoners as well as fictional ones.

In the first novel, Moose asks the famous gangster and prisoner Al Capone to help get his autistic older sister into a special school that could be helpful to her. She gets in, and Moose never quite knows if Capone made it happen, except that he got a note from Capone in his prison-laundered clothes: "Done." The second novel begins with Moose getting another note from Capone: "Your turn."

As Moose gets more mixed up in this uncomfortable communication with a con, he feels helpless. It's even worse when his father explains -- knowing nothing of his son's connection to Capone -- that once you owe a con a favor, he always "ups the ante."

Like many novelists, Choldenko based her fictional characters at least partly on reality. Moose, for example, is loosely based on her older brother. Choldenko, like Moose, also had an older sister with autism; she died when Choldenko was a teenager. "My brother and my sister had this really nice relationship," she said. "I was always jealous of that because he got a lot of attention around it. It was great; he deserved it."

Writing the character of Moose, she said, gave her a chance to live her brother's life a little bit.

-- Margaret Webb Pressler

"Al Capone Shines My Shoes," Dial Books, 288 pages, ages 9-12.