Your Humble Blogger is getting behind on the old Book Reports, eh? I’m now four behind, which is rather a lot, really. Perhaps I need to read another very long book, just to give myself time to catch up on the rest. The problem is that when I’m in the middle of reading a very long book, I tend to pick up a short quick read just to give myself a change of pace, and then I’m behind again, aren’t I?
The quick read this time was Al Capone does my Shirts, by Gennifer Choldenko. It’s a YA novel about a family that lives on Alcatraz. The father is working as a security guard and electrician, the mother gives piano lessons on the mainland, the daughter is autistic and the son is the main character. There isn’t much to him other than being the main character. Oh, he has some minor preferences (he likes to play baseball and is a good fielder), but mostly he’s just the guy in the situation. And it’s a depressing situation. The family is poor, his mother is emotionally unstable, and the Alcatraz life ain’t so hot. About halfway through, I nearly gave up the book altogether, as the depressing and dispiriting bits were true enough and well-written enough to depress me and get my spirits down, and there wasn’t anything else in the book.
I persevered, though, and things improved. There was some, well, not redemption as such, but something positive, at any rate, reconciliation. I didn’t much like the actual ending, the last few pages, but the last quarter or so of the book before that was quite nice.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.