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