Hey Blog! Time for my summer book review!
The book I am reviewing today was written back in 1998, and is totally unlike anything I have ever read before. The plot is the more twisted and convoluted than a half-knitted ball of string after three cats have fought over it while trying to tie the whole thing up in knots, and the result is a masterpiece of balance, hidden secrets, laws, curses, and a slowly revealing truth. Holes, by Louis Sacher, is totally unique. My big brother read it when he was younger, and now Dad has found a copy for me.
The plot is made up of three parts. Two are much earlier, and the third and main story is set contemporarily. Of course, according to Mrs. Yelnats, curses don’t exist and we shouldn’t believe in them, but… Anyway, the timeline really starts with 19th Century Latvia, where the protagonist Stanley Yelnats’s no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather Elya Yelnats falls in love with the most beautiful girl in the village, Myra. To cut a long story short, Elya tries to provide the fattest pig to gain her hand, with the help of the old gypsy (witch?) Madam Zeroni. While originally against the idea, she agrees, so Elya has to carry a pig up a certain mountain, let it drink from a certain stream, and sing a special song – every day until Myra’s birthday, and then carry Madam Zeroni up the mountain too, or his family be cursed for eternity. He almost succeeds, but fails on the final day, causing him to not only lose Myra but receive the curse, and when he emigrates to America, he finds a trail of bad luck following. By the time his great-great-grandson Stanley Yelnats IV is born, the curse is not yet broken, and the song has become a lullaby.
One generation later, in the town of Green Lake in Texas, white schoolteacher Kate Barlow falls in love with the black onion seller Sam. When the two kiss, which goes against the racist laws of the state, Kate’s schoolhouse is attacked, and as the couple try to row away, Sam is shot and Kate is ‘rescued’. After Sam’s death, a curse is somehow placed on Green Lake, causing a hundred-and-ten-year drought; Kate later escapes and becomes outlaw Kissin’ Kate, who robs and leaves lipstick kisses on her victims. She even robs Elya’s son Stanley Yelnats I, a continuation of the bad luck which rids the Yelnats of their fortune. Eventually, the local landowner comes back to find Kate and demand her buried loot. She refuses, gets bitten by a venomous Yellow-Spotted Lizard, and dies laughing.
Stanley Yelnats IV, the main character, arrives at Camp Green Lake: Juvenile Correctional Facility after he is falsely convicted of shoe theft. At the camp, all campers have to dig a 5ft deep, 5ft wide hole every day, to “build character” probably looking for something buried on the dry lake bed. Over time, he gets to know the other boys in his tent, including one named Zero (Hector Zeroni), who is the smallest and best digger. After finding a lipstick tube with KB (Kate Barlow?!) on the end of it, Stanley deduces her treasure – including his grandfather’s treasure – might just be buried somewhere near: and possibly what the campers, or rather the Warden who controls them, are looking for!
Holes is definitely the one of the best books I have read this year, and stands alone in all books in the world. I have never to my knowledge read a book with flashbacks before, nor have I read a book containing so finely blended paranormal and, well, it’s not ordinary, more non-supernatural. You don’t often hear of a book for children or young teens set in what is effectively a jail, a forced labour camp. Even though the camp has no fences or any kind of protection – it has the only water in three hundred miles, so if anyone tried to run away, they would die. Probably. It includes difficult themes for writers to introduce to children, namely being convicted in court, and racism, which, even though I am constantly thinking up stories, I would definitely find hard to incorporate in a way that would be suitable for a target audience. The setting and characteristics of that setting (like scorpions, rattlesnakes, a scorching sun and yellow-spotted lizards) cause an atmosphere of tense excitement and possible danger everywhere, the greatest of these in the form of a lack of water. On the whole, it is an amazingly complicated, but brilliant book!
Can Stanley break two curses, and clear his name of shoe theft? I guess you have to (chorus) READ THE BOOK! Whatever way you take it, Holes is profoundly individual, and it will definitely remain on my shelf. Look out for my next book review coming soon!