{"id":11530,"date":"2008-10-11T12:18:23","date_gmt":"2008-10-11T16:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/10\/11\/11530.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:49:20","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:49:20","slug":"book-report-al-capone-does-my","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/10\/11\/book-report-al-capone-does-my\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Al Capone Does My Shirts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger is getting behind on the old Book Reports, eh? I&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;m behind again, aren&#8217;t I?<br \/>\n<p>The quick read this time was <a href=\"http:\/\/us.penguingroup.com\/nf\/Book\/BookDisplay\/0,,9780142403709,00.html?Al_Capone_Does_My_Shirts_Gennifer_Choldenko\">Al Capone does my Shirts<\/a>, by Gennifer Choldenko. It&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s just the guy in the situation. And it&#8217;s a depressing situation. The family is poor, his mother is emotionally unstable, and the Alcatraz life ain&#8217;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&#8217;t anything else in the book.<br \/>\n<p>I persevered, though, and things improved. There was some, well, not redemption as such, but something positive, at any rate, reconciliation. I didn&#8217;t much like the actual ending, the last few pages, but the last quarter or so of the book before that was quite nice.<br \/>\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger starts catching up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18536,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11530\/revisions\/18536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}