Still Alice and Al Capone Does My Shirts: two brief reviews

taken from Goodreads.com

I finished Still Alice sometime last week and meant to write the blog post about it, but time passed and I forgot. So here I am, writing another post with two reviews. Whoops.

I absolutely loved this book (and the audiobook, which was read by the author and was very well done). Alice Howland is an incredibly successful linguistics professor at Harvard University. With an equally successful scientist husband and three beautiful adult children, Alice enters her 50th birthday with pride. She blames lost keys and forgotten appointments on her stressful schedule, but when she gets hopelessly lost just two blocks from her house one day, she is forced to admit that something may be wrong. Alice is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, and the rest of the book follows her gradual mental decline.

This is a heartbreaking book, and scary in a way that watching The Notebook is scary, but it's also a great read. I enjoyed the relationships Alice had with the other characters (except for her stupid husband who I very much did not like) and I thought Genova did an incredible job walking us through the progression of Alice's disease. I'm excited to see the movie at some point soon; I think Julianne Moore will do/did an awesome job.

taken from Goodreads.com

This is another one of those books that has been on my radar for a long time; I first saw it (and it's companion books) when I was student teaching. When I was shopping for new audiobooks at the library a couple weeks ago I saw they had this one and I grabbed it.

Moose Flanagan's family moves to Alcatraz Island in the 1930s when his dad gets a job as a prison guard. Moose has a hard time adjusting to this new community, with world-class murderers and rapists living right next door to him. At school - across the bay on the mainland - the Alcatraz kids are like celebrities, and the overbearing warden's daughter soon has Moose wrapped up in a money-making scheme that has potential to get them all in trouble.

This book was super cute. It's not my new favorite and although I'm planning on reading the other two companion books at some point, I'm not feeling the need to rush right into them. That being said, I really did enjoy it. The shining star of the book - and probably the reason it won the Newberry Award - is the historical accuracy of the plot. I feel like I learned so much (confirmed as facts by the author's note at the end) about what life on Alcatraz was like: guards' families really did live on the island, and they really did go to school across the bay with San Francisco kids. The other interesting story line follows Moose's sister, who suffers from some sort of unknown mental disabilities (in the author's note, Choldenko explains that Natalie has autism, which hadn't been named at that point in history). The discussion about mental handicaps in the 1930s - and today, really - is a very interesting one that's handled well in this book. So even though it wasn't the most funny or endearing or sweet book in the whole world, it would be a great book (and, I suspect, series) to give kids some solid historical fiction and open up some dialogues about history.

Friends, just a little 2015 goals update: I'm currently reading my very last book on my list. Woot.