Al Capone Does My Shirts Characters

Nice Little Church BoyBegrudgingly, Moose is the hero of our tale. What do we mean? We'll let him explain this himself: "I was born responsible. It's a curse" (3.39). Moose is a play-by-the-rules,...

Okay, so Natalie is autistic. Because of this, in order to understand her character, first we need to understand a bit about the time period she's living in—the 1930s. Key to understanding Natali...

You should probably do ahead and refer to Piper as Miss Bossy-Pants because this chick definitely wears the pants in the Alcatraz friend group, leading Moose and the other kids on mischievous missi...

Moose's mother is a tough one, and her son describes her as a "one-woman commando unit" (13.57). Let's think about why this might be the case. Moose has really mixed feelings about his mom. On t...

Moose's dad is a man of few words, either because he's off working (which he does a lot) or because he's keeping his thoughts to himself. We know he loves his family, since he works so hard to supp...

Theresa's the rough-and-tumble one in the gang. She has "black curly hair that's flat on one side, as if she slept on it. She's missing half of her teeth" (2.48). She's pretty headstrong, too, the...

The warden is the boss on Alcatraz Island, and whatever he says goes. Even his wily daughter, Piper, occasionally comes under his rule-enforcement. As most powerful men do, the warden comes off as...

For the real deal on Al Capone, infamous criminal, check out the "Shout-Outs" section, as well as our "Brain Snacks" (nom nom nom). In the book, we never even meet the guy… and yet he's in the ti...

Jimmy MattamanJimmy is Theresa's older brother. He's about Moose's age, and he's described as looking like the boy version of Theresa: "Same curly black hair. Same slight build" (9.22). But he's no...