Holes

Notes:

This book is a fixture on school reading lists and it's not hard to see why. Its author certainly presents serious story elements — tough prison camp conditions, a sadistic and scheming warden and her unfriendly subordinates, the injustice of Stanley's imprisonment and the misfortunes his family suffer from. But he does so with a very slightly larger-than-life humour which takes the edge off what might otherwise be a gritty prison camp story.

Stories intertwine throughout the book, past and present. The shoes for whose theft Stanley is imprisoned were taken, in fact, by another Camp inmate while their owner is the first to benefit from Mr Yelnat's first successful invention. Meanwhile, Stanley's ancestor is robbed by Kate Barlow whose own tragic history is centred on the dried-up lake where Stanley is sent to prison.

Stanley himself is likeable, a innocent fish out of water in a young offenders' prison camp where the other inmates really are petty criminals. He muddles through, canny enough to get on the right side of the right people, but still managing to get on the wrong side of Mr Sir, second-in-command to The Warden. Mr Sir enjoys the control he holds over the boys, maliciously refusing them water, but at the same time he's only a subordinate and suffers under the Warden in a comically scary way (involving rattlesnake venom and nail varnish). The Warden is the kind of manic and mannish woman you would expect to be played by someone like Sigourney Weaver if the book were ever made into a film.

Although the Camp is home to a few dozen young offenders, we're never introduced to the seamier side of such places. This isn't that kind of book. There's not even any after-lights-out smut being talked. Not because the lads are working towards qualifications in Sweetness & Light: it's just avoided. There's a certain commonplace nastiness and a kind of pecking order but nothing you wouldn't find in a school story for about the same age group.

At the centre of it all is Stanley, a happy-go-lucky lad from a family which blames its long-running misfortune on its ancestor's failure to carry the local Wise Woman up a mountain as his side of a bargain. The story deliberately sidesteps the question of whether there really was such a curse. But it's certainly true that the family's luck turns just after Stanley unwittingly fulfis his ancestor's side of the bargain.

And yet, curse or no curse, it's Stanley's generous hard work (helped by Zero) which unearths the remains of his ancestor's stolen property. And it's his inventor father's perseverance and optimism which, independently, produces a product which makes the family money. This is not a story about looking for a “magical” solution; rather, it's about making what you can of the situation you're in.