"Holes" by Louis Sachar

A lot of people don’t know if they’re unlucky or not, so I came up with a little test to try and help them out. Things like, if you’ve ever been sent to a boy’s detention center called Camp Green Lake for something that wasn’t your fault, you might be unlucky. If your overseers are complete douche bags who would rather watch you die of dehydration than give you an adequate amount of water, you might be unlucky. If your workload at Camp Green Lake consists of digging a five foot hole in all directions during the hottest part of the day, you might be unlucky.

Or you could just be a kid named Stanley Yelnats, who personifies unluckiness to the nth degree. A pair of stolen celebrity shoes literally fell from the sky and landed in his hands. An officer stopped and arrested him before he was eventually sent to Camp Green Lake to do tedious and body-shredding work. If that’s not an odd coincidence, I don’t know what is.

Or it could be that his great grandfather was cursed by a witch for not keeping a promise. It seems petty to blame an entire misunderstanding like Stanley’s story on a witch’s curse. However, the more Stanley digs these holes and finds interesting artifacts, the more he realizes that his family history plays a huge role in this story. Suddenly, this tale of bad luck turns into a conspiracy theory that almost kills Stanley multiple times.

That’s a lot for a small child to take in as he reads “Holes”. Then again, “Holes” is the kind of story that both children and adults can enjoy despite the former being the target audience. It is read in grade school, after all. It just wasn’t read in my grade school, because “Holes” came out in 1998 and I was already a teenager.

I found out about this gem after Disney took it upon themselves to make a movie out of it. I never watched the movie, I just saw portions of it. I didn’t even realize Camp Green Lake was a detention center until I heard about Stanley Yelnats having a lawyer. So when I saw this novel in a bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, I knew I had to have it.

Yes, most of the book consisted of harsh treatment toward the unfortunate, but since it was geared toward children, it had things that distinguished it from “bully porn” as I like to call it. It has a fast pace, dark humor, and an overall creative story that left no stone unturned in terms of interweaving plot devices.

You don’t have to feel like a toddler for reading this wonderful book. On the contrary, you might actually learn something from this despite having qualified for retirement benefits from social security. Chew on that for a minute.

　

***PARODY DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***

DR. CUSHING: What’s wrong, Crazy K? You don’t like being strapped to a spinning torture table? Well, you should have thought about that before you agreed to behavioral modification.

CRAZY K: Mmmmmmmmmmm!!!

-Tales From the Hood-