The Notorious Izzy Fink

By Don Brown

Sam Glodsky lives among the rough-and-tumble gangs on the streets of New York's Lower East Side. When 13-year-old Sam falls in with fearsome gangster Monk Eastman, he joins an outrageous scheme to rescue Eastman's prize racing-pigeon from a cholera-ridden steamship quarantined in the harbor. The caper Monk hatches to snatch the bird pairs Sam with his archenemy, the notorious Izzy Fink. Widely acclaimed for his picture book histories, Don Brown's first historical novel is a fast-paced tale of immigrant life at the turn of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781626726758

Don Brown

Don Brown is the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction and Sibert Honor–winning author and illustrator of many nonfiction graphic novels for teens and picture book biographies. He has been widely praised for his resonant storytelling and his delicate watercolor paintings that evoke the excitement, humor, pain, and joy of lives lived with passion. School Library Journal has called him “a current pacesetter who has put the finishing touches on the standards for storyographies.” He lives in New York with his family. booksbybrown.com Instagram: @donsart

Reviews for The Notorious Izzy Fink

[bobby3457 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought that this book was pretty good. One thing I liked about it was that I was the only person that has checked it out at the library. This book is about a boy named Sam. His mother was killed by a cobblestone that was trown in a gang fight between the Irish and the Russians. Now he has to privide for himself and his father who doesn't feel that life is important without his wife. He is looking for a way to make money when a doctor finds him and asks him for his help. That is when things change in his life and he does a job for Monk Eastman who helped a person with Colarea escape from the ship that is docked in the harbor. I thought that this was the type of book you would read in your spare time and had nothing to do, but I would not read unless I had nothing else to do at all.