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Summary –
In this Newbery Award winning novel by Louis Sachar, we follow the adventures of Stanley Yelnats, an unlucky, overweight teen who has been found guilty of stealing a pair of sneakers. As punishment, he’s sent to Camp Green Lake, a camp for wayward boys. Under the control of the Warden and her counselors, the boys spend all day every day digging up holes in the dry Texas heat. Digging starts at 5 a.m. so they can avoid the worst of the sun. Stanley, or Caveman as the other kids call him, makes friends with Zero, X-Ray, Armpit, Zigzag, Squid, and Magnet, the other boys in tent D. When Stanley discovers that Zero (Hector Zeroni) doesn’t know how to read, the two make an arrangement: Zero will help Stanley dig his holes, and Stanley will teach him his letters. Once their arrangement is discovered by the counselor in charge of Tent D, Mom, Zero is embarrassed publicly by his pointed questions. He smacks Mom with a shovel and runs away from the camp. A few days later, Stanley decides to run away as well. As fate would have it, he eventually finds Zero, and the two make their way across the desert toward God’s Thumb, an odd rock formation that turns out to be surrounded by wild onions, kept green by a welcome supply of water. The two boys recuperate in the shade of the rock formation, surviving on water and onions, until they decide to sneak back to Camp Green. They plan to dig for treasure in the hole where Stanley had earlier found Kissing Kate Barlow’s lipstick container. They find a mysterious suitcase in the bottom of the hole, but are discovered by the Warden and Mom. Mrs. Mornego, the attorney that Stanley’s family had hired to help Stanley, accompanied by the Texas A.G., intercedes at the just the right moment and has the two boys released into her custody. The suitcase, belonging to Stanley’s great-great-grandfather, contained a treasure-trove of stock certificates. The boys use part of the money to buy Stanley’s parents a house and to find an investigator to track down Hector’s missing mother.
Lucien’s thoughts –
This has been my favorite book we have had on our reading list thus far. The writing is hilarious in its brilliant use of understatement, inference, and irony. Even before we meet the characters, we are introduced to Camp Green Lake, a dry lakebed that once had a lake on it, but now is nothing but holes, rattlesnakes, scorpions, and yellow-spotted lizards. Sachar creates funny, rounded characters from the kids in the Tent D to the characters of the novel’s backstory: the original Stanley Yelnats, outlaw Kissing Kate Barlow, and Sam the onion man. It’s uplifting to see how much Stanley grows in character from the beginning of the novel to the end. In addition, the novel cleverly intertwines the story of present-day Stanley with vignettes from the past; as the story of Stanley’s ancestors and the story of a teacher turned outlaw have profound consequences for the present day action. Sachar deftly interweaves the multiple narrative arcs into one cohesive story that was just nearly impossible to put down. I cannot recommend a book more strongly than I do this one.
Librarian’s use—
One of the topics that is central to the flashback story of Kate and Sam is the fact that he is an African-American and she is a white school-teacher. In Texas, as in much of the South, it was illegal at that time for them to kiss. Sam is chased and shot to death by a lynch mob, and the town Sheriff condones the mob’s actions. The book provides a glimpse into a period in time when Jim Crow laws made it difficult for African-American in the South to lead their lives. This can be a window to a discussion of changes in the laws that allow people of different races to marry each other and how things have changed for the better. The librarian can tie this novel to other books about life in South under Jim Crow laws, selecting from appropriate biographies, non-fiction, and fiction books.
Other Reviews —
Wannamaker, A. (2006) Reading in the gaps and lacks: (De)Constructing Masculinity in Louis Sachar’s Holes. Children’s literature in education, 37 (1), 15-33.
Louis Sachar’s novel Holes (US, 1998; UK, 2000) has received much praise from both critics and child readers, who love the complex tall tale he has woven about two boys whose lives are connected by fate and an almost magical legacy of ancestral curses and obligations. Sachar creates characters and situations that seem realistic, but always teeter over to the side of the magical because they are wonderfully excessive and draw on common motifs from legends, folk tales, and popular culture... The novel does not easily fit into any one genre: while it is often classified as contemporary realism, it could also fit into the categories of fantasy or magical realism... This rich and complex novel – also on the border between children’s and young adult literature – has been awarded the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, the ALA Best Book for Young Adults award, the School Library Journal Best Bookof the Year award, and several other major awards.
Furthermore, at a time when educators, parents, and U.S. policy makers are becoming increasingly concerned about reports of boys’ declining levels of literacy, Holes could be seen as a useful book that can interest boys in reading: it is easy to read, the plot moves quickly, it is adventurous, and it features likeable boy protagonists.
Mollegaard, K. H (2010) Haunting and history in Louis Sachar’s Holes. Western American literature, 45 (2), 139-161.
Many landscapes of the US West, fictional as well as real, are haunted by specters of the past. Jacques Derrida noted in Specters of Marx (1994) that linear history cannot explain how the past saturates the present, nor can it explain how time seems to be out of joint when events from the past reemerge and provoke events in the present... Specters of the past are always part of the present, not merely as revivals of the past, but as crucial cultural and political factors that set in motion events in the present... Since Holes is one of the few books evoking Wild West mythology and frontier history recommended on current junior high/high school reading lists, anyone interested in the literature of the US West should consider how this novel simultaneously deconstructs and infuses the notoriously "empty" landscapes of the West with specters of racial violence, rebellious women, and Wild West legends.
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