Module 4 – Holes

image from www.amazon.com

Sachar, L.(1998) Holes. New York, NY: Frances Foster Books.

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.

Module 1 - Miss Smith’s Incredible Storybook

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Garland, M. (2003). Miss Smith’s incredible storybook. New York, NY: Puffin Books.

Summary –

Zach’s first grade teacher, Miss Smith is something different from what he’s come to expect in a teacher.  In her hands, story-telling time comes to life, with the characters leaping off the page and into the classroom.  Zach and his fellow students find themselves in the middle of the action. However, things go awry on the day Miss Smith is late for class. The principal, Mr. Rittenrotten, begins to read from Miss Smith’s magical storybook and is spooked when the characters from the story invade the classroom.  He leaves the classroom in a panic, looking for help.  Student after student all take turns reading snippets from different stories, and the characters from various stories all vie for attention and soon overrun the hallways of the school.  When Miss Smith finally arrives, she’s able to restore order to the mess, reading each story from beginning to end and returning each cast of characters back into the book.

Lucien’s thoughts –

I think the book uses very exciting language to show how a story can come to life in the hands of an able storyteller.  Zach can “feel the breeze in his hair and hear the waves pounding on the side of the ship.”  It uses vibrant language that engages the senses to show how a story can transport the readers into a world of imagination.  It also reinforces good reading skills in that the chaos created when everyone reads little bits of various stories is reversed when the teacher reads each story from beginning to end.

The illustrations are brightly colored and rich in detail.  For example, as the children are listening to a story about pirates, the classroom changes into a pirates ship, its deck full of student desks and its borders filled with peg-leg pirates, pirates with eye-patches, and a chest full of gold. Later, as the children cause confusion reading from different stories, the pages are filled with character from various well-know children’s tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Robin Hood, Dorothy, Tom Sawyer, Humpty Dumpty and others. Miss Smith is distinctive in her bright red glasses, wild red hair, and punk-rock leather jacket.

Librarian’s use –

One of the ways to discuss the book with young readers is to invite the audience in helping you identify some of the characters found in the stories illustrated in the various pages of Miss Smith’s Incredible Storybook and see if the audience can tell you what story they come from.  This exercise connects this book about reading with other books that the children might want to explore.  It would be handy for the librarian to have picked out copies some of stories in question: the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, the story Robin Hood, the Wizard of Oz, the story of the three little pigs, Alice in Wonderland, etc.  You can then ask the audience to think about what would happen if the characters swapped places with characters from other books; would the story still be the same?  what would be different?  You can also invite the readers to think about their favorite book, and ask them to draw a picture of their favorite book character.

Other reviews—

Threadgill, C., Jones, T. E., Toth, L., Charnizon, M., Grabarek, D., & Larkins, J. (2003). Miss Smith's incredible storybook (Book). School Library Journal, 49(10), 125.

Zack's exciting new teacher has a magic storybook. When she opens it up and reads aloud, the characters pop out and bring the tales to life right before the students' eyes. But Miss Smith's book isn't for everybody, and when stuffy Principal Rittenrotten has to fill in for her one morning, the dragon, princess, and knight that materialize from the pages send him from the room in a panic. The only way to make them disappear is to finish their respective stories, but Zack's classmates keep beginning new ones instead, until the school is overrun with Goldilocks, the Mad Hatter, and other such characters, seen vividly cavorting across the full-page spreads. Fortunately, Miss Smith shows up just in time and returns them to the safety of the book's pages, leaving the principal confused and her students forever in her debt. The lively, bright illustrations have a glossy, computer-generated quality that young readers will appreciate. Miss Smith wears a black leather jacket and a lapel button advertising "The Clash," and has a punk-rock hairdo. A satisfactory addition to most collections.

Miss Smith’s incredible storybook. (Book). (2003). Kirkus Reviews, 71(11), 803.

Zack's new second-grade teacher confounds his expectations, not so much with her black leather jacket and flaming red brush-cut, as with the big, ornately tooled book she carries--which, when opened, disgorges real pirates, pigs, knights, dragons, and the like as she reads. When Miss Smith is late one day, the Principal, and then the children, get hold of her book, and because they can't manage to finish the stories they start, utter chaos ensues until she sweeps in to restore order. Using saturated hues and crisply drawn figures, Garland crowds the classroom with lively characters, many of them recognizable from classic stories and folktales. A brief but animated invitation to the pleasures of reading, as well as a tribute to unconventional teachers everywhere.