Title: A child out of Alcatraz
First published: 1997
Description: A little girl lives with her family in a picturesque seaside community near San Francisco. An American neighborhood like any other, sheltered in the seeming tranquillity of the 1950s. Except it exists on the island of Alcatraz, the Rock, where a looming cellhouse imprisons the most vicious and irredeemable of America's criminals.

Olivia grows up here and watches as her family slowly falls apart, trapped in its own prison rules and silences. She watches the disintegration of her mother, a brilliant woman isolated in a role that closes in on her as inexorably as the metallic crash of any cell door. Olivia can only watch, and retreat into herself, for she's only a little girl; there's no escape for her from the island she calls home.
Subjects: Fiction, Officials and employees, Prisons, California, fiction
Places: California, Alcatraz Island (Calif.)
LC classification: PS3559.S66 C48 1997