Sunday, March 11, 2012

Holes review

Holes by Louis Sachar
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, 241 pages

Have you ever dug a hole? If so, have you dug a hole five feet deep? If so, have you dug a hole five feet deep in the scorching heat? Stanley Yelnats has. This week’s review is that of Louis Sachar’s hit children’s book (later a moderately successful Disney movie) Holes.
The general idea for Holes came from Sachar returning home from a fairly cool Maine vacation to a very hot Texas summer. Normally, Sachar thinks of the characters for his book first. However, this time he thought of the place first: Camp Greenlake, where there was no lake (anymore) and almost nothing was green. The reason for this was that the lake, once the biggest in the state, had evaporated after a hundred or so years of no rain, turning it into a barren desert. The main character’s last name, Yelnats, is his first name backwards (because they don’t mention it enough in the book).
Anyway, Holes is the story of a boy named Stanley Yelnats IV, who was walking home from school when he was attacked by a pair of sneakers. Okay, not so much attacked, more that they landed on him from above. Anyway, he was arrested for theft of the sneakers because it was impossible for him to convince the judge that hey came from the sky. Stanley’s choices were either prison or 18 months at Camp Greenlake. Having never been to camp, Stanley opted for that. What he expected: a stereotypical American summer camp. What he got: a child correctional facility in the middle of the desert.
For the course of their sentence, the boys at the camp were to dig one hole per day, the length of his shovel down and across (approximately 5 feet). Once that was done, they could do whatever they wanted. However, if they found anything interesting, they could take the rest of the day off. Eventually, Stanley finds an empty lipstick tube with the initials KK on it (don’t worry; there’s no extra K there). Suddenly, the mysterious Warden who never left her cabin has come out, and demands the area around the hole dug up. But for what? As well as this, the book has a few flashbacks to Elya Yelnats, who accidentally stole a pig from a gypsy, making him Stanley’s “no good, dirty rotten, pig stealing great-great-grandfather”; and to Catherine Barlow, a teacher when Greenlake was actually a lake.
A fun fact about my history with this book: I’ve actually had to read it twice during the course of my education (once in Year 9, once during my second year of TAFE). It is one of the only books I read in high school I actually tolerated (The others being Macbeth and Don’t Start Me Talking: The Lyrics of Paul Kelly). As long as the kids ignore the large number of coincidences in the book, I’m sure they’ll enjoy it.

My rating: 7/10
Any suggestions, post them below

Sunday, March 4, 2012

The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe review

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
Geoffrey Bles, 1950, 208 pages

YAY! I made it to ten reviews. This is the longest running New Year’s Resolution of all time. Well, might as well get into it. Review number ten is of the first book in The Chronicles of Narnia series . . . at least, the first one written (this is what happens when you don’t plan ahead).
The origins of this book are almost a century old. Back when Lewis was sixteen (1914 or 15) he saw a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and a parcel. Then, when he was about forty (circa 1939) he decided to make a story out of it. It was around 1939 that he was given three children. Not his own, but children that were evacuated from London to avoid bomb raids (remember, this was WWII people). The edition of the book I read contained a letter from Lewis to his god-daughter Lucy, saying that he was writing the book for her, though when he finished it she’d be too old for fairy tales, and when it was published she’d be older still, so he wouldn’t know what she thought of it until he was too deaf to hear. Well, he was right, though with a different sort of ‘deaf’ (too soon?)
The plot actually does relate to the kids being brought to Lewis’s house quite strongly. The characters (Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy), were evacuated from London during WWII to escape the bomb raids. They ended up living with an old professor, who owned a large house with many mysteries in it. One rainy day, they four of them were exploring the house, and found a room with nothing more than an old wardrobe in it. The other three left the room, but Lucy wanted to look inside the wardrobe. She opened it, and saw only coats. She went into the wardrobe, reaching for what she assumed would be the back of the wardrobe. However, what she found was another world, covered entirely in snow.
While there, she met a faun by the name of Mr. Tumnus, who informed her that the queen of Narnia, The White Witch, was on the lookout for children, and that anyone who saw them was to report it to her or be turned to stone. Lucy returned to her own world, expecting that hours had passed, when in fact only seconds had passed. After a little while, Edmund had stumbled across Narnia too, but he found The White Witch. She offered to make him king of Narnia, in exchange for bringing his brother and sisters to her. Can The White Witch get all four of the kids before Aslan the Lion shows up to stop her? (I had to say something about the lion; he’s one of the title characters).
It was odd seeing several very Christian references (i.e. “it’s always winter, but never Christmas”) but there’s a high level of magic use (i.e. the dark arts). I’m gonna let that slide since it’s a children’s book (and not a bad one at that), but still, maybe I’m just looking into it too hard.

My rating: 7/10

Any suggestions, post them below