Module 4: Holes

Book Summary: Accused of stealing a pair of shoes, Stanley Yelnats is sent to the Green Lake Camp detention center for boys. Every day, all day, the boys spend their time digging holes in the dried up desert that was once the largest lake in Texas. Stanley realizes that the boys are actually digging because the warden is looking for something. Stanley chases after his friend Zero and they find a field of onions and groundwater. While they are there, the boys decide to come back and locate the buried treasure. The warden apprehends them and they are almost attacked by a group of lizards but the onions they ate protect them. The treasure Stanley finds is a briefcase of valuables that once were meant for his ancestor of the same name.The book also tells the story of the history of Stanley's family and the curse that was placed on them that is causing his bad luck.

APA Reference of Book:  Sachar, L. (1998). Holes. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Impressions:  Such a fantastic book for children. It has a certain magical quality to it from the curse and somewhat surreal environment and is incredibly entertaining to read. The book is occasionally very funny and Stanley's adventure is so much fun to read. It keeps you turning the pages and you will not want to put it down. I just learned that there is a second book and I would love to read that as well.
 
Professional Review:

Louis Sachar has written an exceptionally funny, and heart-rending, shaggy dog story of his own. With its breadth and ambition, Holes may surprise a lot of Sachar fans, but it shouldn't. With his Wayside School stories and — this reviewer's favorite — the Marvin Redpost books, Sachar has shown himself a writer of humor and heart, with an instinctive aversion to the expected. Holes is filled with twists in the lane, moments when the action is happily going along only to turn toward somewhere else that you gradually, eventually, sometimes on the last page, realize was the truest destination all along.

The book begins, "There is no lake at Camp Green Lake," and we are immediately led into the mystery at the core of the story: "There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas." We soon learn that there is no camp here either, not really, only a boys' detention facility to which our hero, Stanley Yelnats, is headed. Stanley has been convicted of stealing a pair of shoes donated by baseball great Clyde Livingston to a celebrity auction. The fact that Stanley didn't steal the shoes, that indeed they fell from the sky onto his head, is disbelieved by the judge, and even deemed immaterial by Stanley, who blames the whole misadventure on his "no-good-dirtyrotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather!" — a favorite family mantra. And as the book goes on to show, with great finesse anci a virtuoso's display of circularity in action, Stanley is right. His destiny is as palindromic as his name.

We soon learn about that pig-stealing great-greatgrandfather and the curse that has haunted Stanley's family, even though the hapless eider Yelnats, like Stanley, didn't steal anything, and the curse is more of an ordination, a casting of the die. Stanley's great-grandfather found his place in the pattern when he encountered Kissing Kate Barlow, nee Miss Katherine Barlow, who became a ruthless outlaw of the Wild West when her love for Sam, the Onion Man, became cause for small-town opprobrium — and murder. Miss Barlow's recipe for spiced peaches also plays a large part in the story.

Heck, it all plays a large part in the story. Those peaches show up more than a century after they were canned, and their efficacy remains unchallenged. Just like Sam's onions. Just like the lullaby, sung, with telling variations, by the Yelnats cian:

"If only, if only," the woodpecker sighs, "The bark
 on the tree was as soft as the skies." While the wolf
 waits below, hungry and lonely, Crying to the moo-oo-oon,
 "If only, if only."

As for the title: when Stanley gets to Camp Green Lake, he discovers that every day each boy, each inmate, must dig a hole five feet by five feet by five feet. (Why? Too bad you can't ask Kissing Kate Barlow.) Stanley makes a friend, Zero (nicknamed thus because this is exactly what the world finds him to be), with whom he eventually escapes the camp. These boys have a date with destiny and, trust me, it has everything to do with the pig, Kissing Kate, the lullaby, the peaches, the onions… even the sneakers, Sachar is masterful at bringing his realistic story and tall-tale motifs together, using a simple declarative style —

Stanley Yelnats was given a choice. The judge said, "You may go to jail, or you may go to Camp Green Lake."

Stanley was from a poor family. He had never been to camp before.

— that is all the more poignant, and funny, for its understatement, its willingness to stay out of the way.

We haven't seen a book with this much plot, so suspensefully and expertly deployed, in too long a time. And the ending will make you cheer — for the happiness the Yelnats family finally finds — and cry, for the knowledge of how they lost so much for so long, all in the words of a lullaby. Louis Sachar has long been a great and deserved favorite among children, despite the benign neglect of critics. But Holes is witness to its own theme: what goes around, comes around. Eventually.

Sutton, R. (1998, September/October). Holes [Review of the book Holes]. Horn Book Magazine, 74(5), 593-595. Retrieved from www.hbook.com

Library Uses: This could be a good one to use for either a book talk at a middle school for the 6th graders or as a book club choice. Some schools read this for their 6th grade curriculum so there is a potential for a tie in program with the schools where the students who read the book could also get to watch the movie.