Holes

Louis Sachar's Holes is a desert mystery for 9 year olds about a boy sentenced to dig one hole a day for something he didn't do.

What happens

Camp Green Lake has no lake. There was one, the biggest in Texas, but that was over a hundred years ago. It dried up. Then the town dried up, and then the people who lived in it.

In summer it sits at about ninety-five degrees in the shade, and there isn't any shade. There are two old oak trees on the eastern edge with a hammock slung between them. The hammock belongs to the Warden. The Warden owns the shade.

Rattlesnakes and scorpions shelter under the rocks and down the holes the boys dig. The rule on those is simple. Don't bother them and they won't bother you.

Usually.

A sting or a bite won't kill you. It might even get you a day or two lying in your tent instead of digging, which is why a boy sometimes tries for one on purpose.

Usually.

The yellow-spotted lizard is different. That one kills you slowly and there's no usually attached.

Stanley Yelnats did get a choice. Jail or camp. He'd never been to a camp before, so he picked camp, and now he's on a bus with a guard facing him and a rifle across the guard's lap, handcuffed to the armrest, pretending he's off to the sort of camp rich kids go to.

He's innocent. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, which happens to his family a lot, and they blame his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather.

It's a correctional facility and the book doesn't dress it up. Stanley is overweight and gets teased for it at school, and on his last day his maths teacher weighed him against the lightest boy in the class to demonstrate ratios and wrote 3 to 1 on the board without noticing what she'd done to either of them. He was arrested a few hours later. If your child is sensitive about their own size, that bit will sting.

Reading it is the pleasure of very short chapters and very flat sentences. Sachar puts the joke in the gap and lets you find it. The word Usually gets a paragraph to itself, twice, before he gets to the lizard.

Nothing is wasted, either. Every odd detail gets picked up again later, which is very satisfying for a reader who likes things to click.

What to read next

Bradley Chalkers gets much the same deal in There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom. Last seat, last row, empty desks all round him, and a class that says out loud it wants to keep things that way.