Wednesday, June 8, 2022

#tbt: Holes by Louis Sachar

Holes by Louis Sachar. 233 p. Farrar, Straus, Giroux/ Macmillan Publishers, August, 1998. 9780374332657. (Own.) 

Happy Thursday! I'm winging my way to Peoria a bit later today to visit my second eldest son, his wife and their son. Max is graduating from his neurosurgical residency and heading to UCLA for a spine fellowship. His son turned one last month and they are holding a belated birthday party for him as well. Happy times tinged with sadness as my husband, who was so incredibly proud of Max is not here to celebrate as well.

#tbt features Holes by Louis Sachar. After Stanley Yelnats is wrongly convicted of the theft of some donated basketball sneakers, he's sent to Camp Green Lake. There is no camp and there is no lake. All he and the other boys remanded to the facility do all day is dig holes in the hot sun. They are instructed to report any interesting discoveries to the warden.

The Yelnats family is cursed, and in a series of flashbacks, readers learn about how the family curse came to be. And just what about those holes? There's history behind that as well. Mr. Sachar seamlessly weaves these three strands with memorable characters and some hilarious situations. 

Holes won the Newbery Medal as well as the National Book Award. It was named to numerous State Awards and adapted for film in 2003. In 2006, the author published a companion novel called Small Steps.


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