Click here to go to Armadillo Book Reviews HomeArmadillo Associates Home





Books etc. / For children 5 and under / For children 5 and up / For children 8 and up / Learning to read / For children 12 and up / Sophisticated readers-Fat books (Deep books for sophisticated but young readers) / For grumps / About educators educating / Technical Books / Gifted Education / Books whose protagonists are gifted, intellectually / All book reviews /
Search our reviews


Rules: Reviewed

Author:Cynthia Lord
Reading Level (Conceptual):Children 12 and up
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 8 and up
Genre:fiction, autism
Year of publication:2006

In Al Capone Does My Shirts, the first-person narrator is a boy whose family moves to Alcatraz so that his sister may apply to a school for autistic children near San Francisco.

In this less anachronistic modern-day Newbery Honor Book, the first-person narrator, Catherine writes down rules for her autistic brother, David, although she's learned from experience that he routinely ignores them.

Written by the mother of two children, one of whom is autistic, the plot, written with the help of Lord's non-autistic daughter, clearly demonstrates how much the parents of the autistic child demand from the one who does not suffer from that disease.

Catherine's patience and empathy border on saintliness, and the moral (perhaps the message to the author's non-autistic child) seems to be that she is a better person for having helped her parents with her brother.

-- Emily Berk


Other reviews: Rules
 
About the Armadillo Associates Web Site
Internet Design & Development
Object-oriented software design & implementation
API Design & Evangelism
Efficient high tech project management
Evocative high tech PR
Perceptive Technical Reporting
Coastside Film Society
Books & etc.
School-related issues
Armadillian wanderings
Click here for graphical Home Page
Click here for Flash-y armadillos
Search our site



Rants and reviews table of contents / Into the Woods / Annie Get Your Gun / Learning to Build and Program Robots / Stomp



©2024 Armadillo Associates, Inc.
Comments, questions? Send us email
Click here to go Home