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Title: Holes
Author: Louis Sachar
Publication Date: August 20, 1998 (novel), 2016 (audio)
Producer: Audible, Ltd.
Narrated by: Kerry Beyer
Recording Time: 4 hours, 50 minutes
THE PLOT:
via wiki:
Stanley Yelnats IV is wrongfully convicted of theft and is consequentially sent to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile corrections facility in Texas. The novel presents Stanley’s story together with two other linked stories.
Elya Yelnats
Elya Yelnats is 15 years old and lives in Latvia. He is in love with Myra Menke, the most beautiful girl in the village. Myra’s father has decided she should marry when she turns fifteen in two months. Fifty-seven-year-old Igor Barkov offers his fattest pig to Myra’s father in exchange for her hand so Elya asks his friend Madame Zeroni, an old Egyptian fortune teller with a missing foot, for help. She warns him that Myra is an empty-headed girl, but gives him a piglet and tells him to carry it to the top of the mountain every day and sing a special song while it drinks from a stream that runs uphill. If he does this, according to Madame Zeroni, his pig will be fatter than any of Igor’s. In return, she requests that Elya carry her up the mountain. She warns him that if he does not, his family will be cursed.
Elya follows Madame Zeroni’s directions until the last day, when he takes a bath instead of carrying the pig up the hill. His pig and Igor’s weigh exactly the same, so Myra’s father lets her decide whom to marry. When Myra is unable to choose, Elya realizes Madame Zeroni was right about Myra. He tells her to marry Igor and keep his pig and, forgetting his promise to Madame Zeroni, leaves for America. There, he marries the kind and intelligent Sarah Miller but is continually beset by bad luck. The song that he sang to the pig becomes a lullaby passed down by his family.
Kissin’ Kate Barlow
In the year 1888, Green Lake is a flourishing Texas village on its namesake lake. Katherine Barlow, a local schoolteacher famous for her spiced peaches, falls in love with Sam, an African-American onion farmer. She rejects the advances of Charles Walker, the richest man in town, who is nicknamed “Trout” because his feet smell like dead fish. After Katherine and Sam are seen kissing, Trout raises a mob to burn down the schoolhouse. Katherine goes to the sheriff for help, but he refuses to help her and instead demands a kiss. Katherine and Sam attempt to escape across the lake in Sam’s rowboat, but Trout intercepts them with his motorboat. He shoots Sam dead and wrecks his boat, while Katherine is “rescued” against her wishes. From that day on, no rain falls upon Green Lake.
Three days later, Katherine shoots and kills the sheriff. She becomes the outlaw “Kissin’ Kate Barlow”, so named because she leaves a red lipstick kiss on the cheeks of the men she kills. She robs Stanley Yelnats I, son of Elya Yelnats, and leaves him stranded in the desert. Seventeen days later, he is rescued by hunters, but he is delirious and can only explain his survival by saying he “found refuge on God’s thumb”.
After twenty years, Katherine retires to the ruins of Green Lake, now reduced to a ghost town with the namesake lake now a playa. She is confronted by Trout and his wife, now destitute, who demand that she reveal the location of her hidden loot. Katherine refuses, telling them that their descendants could dig holes for the next hundred years without finding it. She lets herself be bitten by a highly venomous yellow-spotted lizard, and dies laughing.
Camp Green Lake
Stanley Yelnats IV’s family seems to be cursed, jokingly always blaming Stanley’s “no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather” Elya for their constant misfortunes. Stanley, who is in middle school, is convicted of stealing a pair of athletic shoes that baseball player Clyde “Sweet Feet” Livingston had donated to a charity auction for the homeless; in reality, Stanley had just picked up the shoes when they fell from an overpass. He is sentenced to 18 months at Camp Green Lake, a juvenile corrections facility.
Prisoners at Camp Green Lake are required to “build character” by digging one cylindrical hole five feet wide and five feet deep every day. The Warden allows campers a day off if they find anything “interesting”. The leader of Stanley’s group, a boy nicknamed X-Ray, tells Stanley to give him anything interesting he finds. Late one day, Stanley finds an empty lipstick tube with “KB” engraved on it. He gives it to X-Ray, who pretends to find it the next morning. For the next week and a half, the Warden has the boys excavate the area of X-Ray’s supposed discovery. Stanley concludes that she is searching for something.
Stanley learns that another prisoner, Zero, is illiterate. Zero volunteers to dig part of Stanley’s hole each day if Stanley teaches him to read. When one of the counselors, Mr. Pendanski, says that Zero is too stupid to learn to read, Zero smashes Mr. Pendanski’s face with his shovel and flees into the desert. When Zero does not return, the Warden assumes he has died. To avoid an investigation, she orders Mr. Pendanski to destroy Zero’s records.
Stanley goes into the desert to save Zero. He finds Zero hiding under the wreck of a rowboat. Zero has survived on what he calls “sploosh”, a peachy nectar stored in old jars he found under the boat. Stanley and Zero drink the last of the sploosh. Zero refuses to return to camp, so they head for a nearby mountain, Big Thumb, that looks like a thumbs up sign. As they ascend the mountain, Zero collapses due to exhaustion. Stanley carries Zero up the hill. He finds water, gives it to Zero, and sings his family lullaby.
Stanley and Zero survive on Big Thumb for a week, eating wild onions from Sam’s old onion fields. Zero, whose real name is Hector Zeroni, reveals that he stole Clyde Livingston’s shoes. He was homeless and needed new shoes. When he realized everyone was making a commotion about the missing shoes, he discarded them by putting them on the roof of a moving car, and they accidentally landed on Stanley.
The boys secretly return to Camp Green Lake, and overnight, they dig where Stanley found the lipstick tube. They find a suitcase but are caught by the camp staff. The Warden, Mr. Sir, and the counselors stand watch over the boys all night, but they do not approach because the boys are in a nest of highly venomous yellow-spotted lizards. Stanley and Zero, however, are safe from the lizards because they smell like onions (which the lizards are known to avoid). When the sun rises, Stanley’s lawyer Ms. Morengo and the state attorney general arrive; Stanley’s conviction has been overturned. The Warden claims that the suitcase was stolen from her, but the suitcase has “Stanley Yelnats” written on it. Stanley refuses to leave without Hector, so Ms. Morengo asks to see Hector’s file. When Hector’s records are unable to be found, Ms. Morengo demands that he be released too. As they drive away, rain falls on Camp Green Lake for the first time in 110 years.
The attorney general shuts down Camp Green Lake. The Warden, whose real name is Ms. Walker, is forced to sell the land.
Hector is revealed to be Madame Zeroni’s great-great-great-grandson. Therefore, when Stanley carries Hector up the mountain, he breaks the curse; the next day, Stanley’s father invented a peach-scented product that eliminated foot odor; the boys name it “Sploosh”. The suitcase, which had belonged to Stanley’s great-grandfather, contains financial instruments worth nearly two million dollars. Stanley and Hector split the money, and Hector hires private investigators to find his mother. A year and a half later, the Yelnats house hosts a Super Bowl party celebrating Clyde Livingston’s endorsement of Sploosh. Hector’s mother softly sings to him a second verse to the Yelnats’ family lullaby.
The Review
Holes by Louis Sachar is an award winning YA novel first published in 1998 and it was delightful. The story follows four generations of the Yelnats family, though it primarily focuses on Stanley Yelnats IV in the present. We follow a pair of other families across time, too, though it is not clear that we are doing so until the end. The author does an excellent job incorporating flashbacks throughout the novel to fill in important historical details, but never remains in those flashbacks for so long that the story loses touch with Stanley IV, in the present. The story was relatively complicated in some sense, with the various plot threads and flashbacks, but it was well-written, fast-paced, and easy to follow.
The story makes comments on society both in the past and present, but it is primarily a story of fate and family curses. The Yelnats family, the Zeroni family, and the Walker family have all been cursed, in one way or another, for a century. Holes brings their descendants together again, a century later, and sees the curses broken. The novel illustrates that we are not as far removed from our ancestors as we might suppose. It also illustrates that what might feel like bad luck today might seem like incredibly good fortune later. The lesson is to work hard and to be decent to the people you meet, and most importantly to be patient. Fate might reward your efforts.
In addition to curse-breaking, the story also touches on crime, the broken justice system for those who are poor, bullying, and race relations. I tried to read this with a mind both for myself and for how a younger reader might handle the story. As an adult, I enjoyed all of it, though I thought the casual violence doled out by the Warden probably needed some explanation (why did the grown men put up with it?) and I thought it might be a bit intense for some younger readers. For example – Warden Walker casually discusses the murder of children and at one point pokes a kid with a pitch fork hard enough to draw blood. In one of the most memorable scenes from the book, she knowingly scratches one of the prison camp deputies across his face, with still-wet with polish and potent snake venom fingernails. This causes him significant pain and swelling. She was never quite cartoonishly evil, but the depiction of an abusive authority figure (a law enforcement official no less) might be very upsetting to a young reader.
The race relations part of the story was very heavy-handed, but in a way that is probably familiar for a YA novel. In a flashback to 1888, we see Kate Barlow fall in love with a black onion farmer named Sam. They are caught kissing, which leads to Sam being killed by the town Sheriff and Kate turning to murder, crime, and banditry. Her trademark was to leave lipstick prints on the cheek of the men she killed. One of her robbery victims – who she did not kill – was Stanley Yelnats I. Kissin’ Kate eventually dies without revealing the location of her buried loot – the only bit of which that we ever learn about having come from Stanley Yelnats. Her arc is interesting in the sense that she transitions from deeply good and sympathetic to murderous, but in a way where she remains a bit sympathetic despite our knowledge of her other deeds. (It might be good to explain to the book’s child readers that regardless of what happens to you, it doesn’t justify turning to a life of revenge murder and robbery.)
Stanley arrives at a youth prison camp completely innocent, though optimistic that things might not be so bad. Part of his optimism is that his life while free had not been so great, with no friends and a bully. Life in the inmate camp is not devoid of bullying, but it also includes friendship. For the first time, he finds self-confidence, too. A part of me – as an adult – bristles at the implicit message to YA novel readers that their lives might improve in prison. You don’t really want to *sell* prison to kids going through a hard time. But it’s also hard to say this novel about an abusive youth inmate camp is actually selling it to its readers. “Prison is an abusive hell, but you’ll make friends” is not an ad campaign for prison. On the other hand, “mutual struggle and suffering lends itself toward friendship-making” might be true, and a needed message for some.
The villain of the book, Warden Walker, is the descendent of the same Sheriff Walker who killed Kissin’ Kate’s love, Sam. The Warden to some degree is also trapped within a multi-generational family curse. She follows her own family tradition in trying to dig up the buried loot hidden by Kissin’ Kate. They know generally where it is buried but not precisely. Now she uses her child inmates to do the digging for her. The end of the book breaks her family curse, too, though not as positively as it happens for the Yelnats family. She’s almost certainly going to prison, as an inmate this time, and with the loot found, the hole digging ends, too.
Hector “Zero” Zeroni is the descendent of the woman who placed a curse on Stanley’s family. He is also the reason Stanley is wrongly accused of shoe theft (though neither of them realize this fact right away.) Perhaps placing the curse created a curse on the Zeroni family, too, because things do not seem to go well for the Zeronis in the century after. Both cursed, the two boys become friends and they help each other, even after Stanley learns the truth about Zero and the shoe robbery. Eventually Stanley even carries a near-death Zero up a mountain, to find a source of water, and from that moment on, having done for a Zeroni what his ancestor did not, the curses on them both seem to break.
In the aftermath, we learn that Stanley was only sent to prison because he was not properly defended at his original trial. Even while enjoying all the wrongs set to right, we cannot help but feel discomfort about the justice system as a whole. It really is true, though, that people with money navigate the legal system better than those without. Perhaps that’s a lesson worth sharing with kids, if it might help them to avoid making bad decisions. It is also true (as we see occasionally in the news) that prisons are not always properly supervised and that abuse can occur there. It might be well to remember, even as children, to stay far enough away from trouble that you don’t have to figure out navigating the potentially unfair justice system at all.
Holes covers a lot of ground (so to speak) but it’s a quick, fast-paced read, with interesting characters and complicated plot arcs. The flashbacks might be initially confusing to a young reader, but I think they’ll get the hang of it. There are also things in the story, violence in particular, that might be too much for sensitive younger readers, but I think most tweens and up can read this and enjoy it. I’m several years beyond being a tween and I definitely enjoyed it.
Have you read Holes? If so, what did you think?
