Holes: Louis Sachar’s Three Stories That Fit Together Perfectly
A perfect combination of three stories that overlap and complete each other until they fit into one. Louis Sachar’s Holes, winner of the Newbery Medal and the US National Book Award, is a children’s novel that adults end up reading too, and it is easy to see why.
Author: Louis Sachar
Title: Holes (1998)
Format: English paperback (Bloomsbury Children’s Books), 272 pages
Scope: Middle-grade novel weaving together a boy at a detention camp, his family curse and an old Wild West story
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/1408865238 (ASIN 1408865238)
Wrong Place, Wrong Time
Stanley Yelnats is an unlucky boy who always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. When a pair of trainers falls from the sky, he takes it as a sign of destiny, but that apparently harmless event brings him far more trouble than good.
Blamed, as the family always says, on his no-good great-great-grandfather, Stanley is sent to Camp Green Lake for eighteen long months: a hostile place where rattlesnakes, yellow-spotted lizards, scorpions and the heat are part of daily life, and where the boys are made to dig a hole every day. There he learns that the world is hard, and that the people in it are not always kind or respectful.
Friendship Under the Sun
Effort, friendship and comradeship run through the story. Sachar also draws a comparison between the racism of the Old West more than a century ago and the present day, and the way the three storylines finally click together is one of the great pleasures of the book.
Stanley Yelnats and Camp Green Lake
Stanley Yelnats (his name reads the same backwards) is sent to Camp Green Lake for a theft he did not commit. There is no lake: only a dried-up desert where the boys dig one hole, five feet wide and five feet deep, every day, supposedly to build character. Stanley blames his bad luck on a family curse laid on his "no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather", and the novel slowly reveals how right he is.
Three Stories, One Puzzle
Sachar cuts between Stanley’s present, his ancestor’s broken promise to a fortune-teller in Latvia, and the tale of Kissin’ Kate Barlow, a schoolteacher turned outlaw in the town of Green Lake a century earlier. Onions, peaches, a pair of stolen sneakers and a lipstick tube all turn out to matter. The pleasure of the final chapters is watching every piece click into place, and realising how carefully the book has been built.
Awards, Film and Sequel
Holes won the US National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 1998 and the Newbery Medal in 1999. Sachar, already known for his comic Wayside School books, wrote the screenplay for the 2003 Disney film himself. A companion novel, Small Steps (2006), follows Armpit, one of the camp boys, after his release.
Who Should Read It
Readers from about ten upwards, and adults looking for a children’s book that respects their intelligence. It is also a classroom favourite because its structure invites discussion about fate, friendship and injustice.
Friendship at the Centre
Beneath the clever plot is the friendship between Stanley and Zero, the silent boy everyone underestimates. Stanley teaches Zero to read; Zero repays him in ways neither of them expects. It is the emotional core of the book and the reason its ending feels earned rather than merely neat.
Why Read It Now
Written for young readers, Holes teaches more than one lesson without ever preaching. It was adapted into a Disney film in 2003. Read it for the puzzle of its plot, and for Stanley, one of the most likeable unlucky heroes in children’s fiction.
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