Read With Us and Win

September 2006 Special Advertising Section 

Some books hook you with characters and stories so familiar it seems the author read your blog for inspiration. Other books transport you to fantastical worlds you could hardly have imagined existed. Perhaps one of the most underrated reading experience, however, is when an author takes you behind the scenes of an actual place you never thought you’d get a chance to see. We’re happy to report that our latest Raising Readers Book Club selection, Gennifer Choldenko’s Al Capone Does My Shirts, satisfies on all three levels.

Setting its fictional story of family dynamics on Alcatraz Island in 1935, the 2005 Newbery Honoree imagines what it would have been like to grow up on the same island where Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly did time. Hardly historical fiction in the strictest sense of the word (although families actually did live on the island when it was a working penitentiary), the book focuses instead on the thoughtful observations and familiar growing pains of its twelve-year-old narrator, a boy named Moose who has just moved there with his prison guard father, his preoccupied mother, and an autistic sister who is to attend a special school in San Francisco.

With just enough historical detail to satisfy our curiosity and just enough old-fashioned adolescent angst to give its breezy storyline a poignant edge, Choldenko’s yarn has our enthusiastic endorsement. We think it’s great fun, and we think you will, too.

If you read Al Capone Does My Shirts, and if you’re between the ages of ten and thirteen, we invite you to pick one of the questions below, answer it in 300 words or fewer, and e-mail it to us at RaisingReaders@mspmag.com. We’ll select our three favorite responses and print them in the next edition of Raising Readers. Plus, our friends at Target will reward each winner with a gift bag that includes a $100 Target GiftCard.

Entries are due by November 15, 2006. Please include your name, age, phone number, and mailing address with your entry. Happy reading and good luck!

The Questions

One
How would you describe Piper, the warden’s daughter? Do you like her? Why or why not? Do you think Moose should be friends with her?

Two
If your brother or sister had a disability like Natalie’s, how do you think your life would be different? Why do you think Moose feels so responsible for what happens to his sister?

Three
Moose says he always does what he is supposed to do, and yet in a few instances in the book he defies the rules. Does Moose make good decisions, even when those decisions go against the rules?