Module 4 Review 2 - Holes

Holes / by Louis Sachar.

Bibliographic Citation:

Sachar, L. (1999). Holes. New York, NY: Frances Foster Books.

Summary:

Holes is about a middle school age boy named Stanley Yelnats, who is wrongly convicted of stealing a famous athletes stinky shoes that had been donated for a charity auction. Stanley’s story is interspersed with the story of his ancestors. He is a boy with a history of being bullied at school and he blames all of his misfortune on his “no-good-dirty-rotten–pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather.” After his conviction, Stanley is given the choice of going to jail or going to Camp Green Lake. He chooses to go to Camp Green Lake.

Camp Green Lake is not really a lake and not really a camp. The boys at Camp Green Lake have been relegated to a barren desert where they have to dig a 5 foot hole every day. Stanley is assigned to D tent with five other boys who have nicknames such as X-Ray, Armpit, Zero and Zigzag. One day Stanley is digging and he finds something shiny and he slowly comes to realize that the holes being dug are not to teach the boys a lesson as they have been told, but to help the warden find something she has been looking for for many years. Stanley, nicknamed Caveman, strikes a deal with Zero for an hour of reading teaching for an hour of digging. During an altercation between Stanley and Zigzag, the deal Stanley and Zero made is made known to the warden who demands that it end. Zero runs away into the mountains and the next day Stanley follows behind. After a week, both have regained their strength and they make a plan to find whatever the warden is looking for, so they return to Camp Green Lake at night to search. They finally find the treasure and are caught by the warden. There is a stand-off between Stanley and Zero and the Warden and the Camp counselors. Stanley is later exonerated and he gets to keep the treasure because it had his name on it. Once they are back home, he and Zero, along with their families, discover the significance of the buried treasure and unfold the connectivity of Stanley and Zero’s family histories.

Impressions:

I found myself rooting for Stanley from the beginning when he was wrongly convicted. Stanley was an unlucky boy who found himself in a bad situation. Stanley changed from a weak boy at the beginning of the story to a strong almost-man at the end. As difficult as his time at the camp was, the changes it afforded him made him stronger physically, but also gave him self-confidence he lacked.

Library Use Suggestions:

Sections at the beginning of this book can be used to illustrate to students what bullying looks like.

They can compare the interpersonal relationships Stanley has at school with his peers and even his teachers with the relationships that develop in the D tent at Camp Green Lake. How did Stanley change and what effect did those changes affect his interpersonal relationships with the other boys at Camp Green Lake.

Reviews:

Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.). Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories--but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles. Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure.

(2000, June 15). [Review of Holes]. Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/louis-sachar/holes/