Al Capone Does My Shirts about a boy named Matthew but everybody calls him “Moose.” Moose moves to Alcatraz. Alcatraz is a jail for the worst criminals like murderers, mob bosses, and convicts. To many people these are not the average neighbors that you would get in the city. You would find that in 1935 Alcatraz was a place with regular people living there because they have a relative working or something.

Moose is a character that is responsible, brave, and kind. He is kind because his parents are always away and he takes care of his sister because she can’t take care of herself. Moose is responsible because he has to take care of the whole family and when his sister didn’t get into the school she needed Moose to take all the calls on the phone. Moose is brave because he once got up close to “Al Capone,” a world famous criminal of murderer.

Moose has to live on Alcatraz with his dad who is a guard and a electrician so he can’t see him often. One of the challenges Moose has to deal with is his own sister Natalie who has problems thinking and has a problem getting into school. One interesting thing that happened is Moose made it into a school where he has to deal with a girl named Piper who  sometimes gets him in trouble. Moose’s mom is kind of struggling to make things fit with her and trying to get Natalie in school. It’s hard because Natalie is 16 but Moose’s mom says she is 10 so she can actually get into a school because she can’t go to many schools because of her learning problems like dyslexia and will freak out.

I enjoyed this book because it always has something to keep you entertained, like when Moose was taking care of his sister and thought he found a baseball from the rec  yard that cons would play with and needed to give it to a friend. (A “Con” is a inmate of a prison). One more reason I liked this book was because you meet so many new characters that are all different. I recommend this book because you will find out new characters and weird encounters like when Moose was on a boat and he met Capone’s mother! Another reason this book is good is because you will find out things other people in the book don’t know. Then you will know and it will be a cliff-hanger because no one other than you knows what happens. Overall I would rate this book four stars because it has good characters and interesting problems. They face but the book is a mix between slow and fast paced so you might not understand some parts but if you re-read you will mostly understand the confusing parts.