Reviews for Holes
Review - Holes
A strange but riveting novel about Stanley Yelnats, who is sent to a youth detention camp and made to dig holes. Funny and clever.
Reviewed by Roger on 2003-01-30 09:17:43
Holesby Louis Sachar | |
| Category: |
"Fiction - Chapter Books" |
|---|---|
| Pages: | 233 |
| Year of Publication: | 1998 |
| Date Read: | 01/29/2003 |
| Notes: | If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy." Such is the reigning philosophy at Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention facility where there is no lake, and there are no happy campers. In place of what used to be "the largest lake in Texas" is now a dry, flat, sunburned wasteland, pocked with countless identical holes dug by boys improving their character. Stanley Yelnats, of palindromic name and ill-fated pedigree, has landed at Camp Green Lake because it seemed a better option than jail. No matter that his conviction was all a case of mistaken identity, the Yelnats family has become accustomed to a long history of bad luck, thanks to their "no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather! Despite his innocence, Stanley is quickly enmeshed in the Camp Green Lake routine: rising before dawn to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet in diameter; learning how to get along with the pack of boys in Group D; and fearing the warden, who paints her fingernails with rattlesnake venom. But when Stanley realizes that the boys may not just be digging to build character — that in fact the warden is seeking something specific — the plot gets as thick as the irony. |
| My Rating: | 9 |