Title: Holes
Author: Louis Sachar
Series: Holes #1
Rating Out of 5: 4 (Really good read!)
My Bookshelves: Book to Film, Contemporary, Easy reading
Dates read: 26th November – 1st December 2019
Pace: Slow
Format: Novel
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Year: 1998
5th sentence, 74th page: But the last thing he wanted to do after digging all day was to dig at night, too.

Stanley Yelants has bad luck (which is all because of his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather).

When Stanley’s bad luck unfairly lands him in the juvenile detention centre Camp Green Lake (a very weird place that isn’t green and doesn’t have a lake), he and his campmates Zero, X-Ray, Armpit, Squid, Magnet and Zigzag are forced to dig holes in order to build character…

But what are they really digging for?

This is one of those books where I’m actually not sure if the book or the movie is better… I can remember watching the movie as a teenager in high school. It’s one of those that seems to be a staple of the Australian high school experience. But I’d never had the chance to actually read the book. I’m not entirely sure how it’s a classic – it seems a little too easy to read. But I do understand why so many people enjoy reading it.

This was such an incredibly easy read. Like, ridiculously. I ripped through it in next to no time (when I actually got a chance to sit down). Although it did flick through past and present a little, it wasn’t done in any kind of confusing way. The language was incredibly easy and accessible. And the entire story was just generally easy to follow and fun to read. I’ll be interested to see what the other books in the series are going to be like…

Holes is kind of an intense story. It is, after all, about a boy who is incarcerated. There’s not going to be sweet, innocent characters in a story like that. It is also about righting the wrongs of the past, finding yourself and, I think most importantly finding a way to like yourself. Or at least, that was the journey that I really got for Stanley. He might have lost a little weight because of his time at Camp Green, but it mostly ends with his actually accepting who he is and finding a friend who feels the same.

I absolutely adore how all of the threads of this story are interwoven. The past, the present, and the future are all weirdly interconnected. It’s hard to write like this in a way that doesn’t feel clunky and contrived. And Sachar manages to do this perfectly. All of the connected lines are completely natural and you only truly realise how they are linked at the very end of the story.

<- Small Steps Review

Stanley Yelnats’ Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake Review ->

Image source: Amazon