Holes by Louis Sachar
The Blurb
Stanley Yelnats' family has a history of bad luck, so he isn't too surprised when a miscarriage of justice sends him to a boys' juvenile detention centre. At Camp Green Lake the boys must dig a hole a day, five feet deep, five feet across, in the dried up lake bed. The Warden claims the labour is character building, but it is a lie. Stanley must dig up the truth.
About Louis Sachar
Louis Sachar (pronounced Sacker), born March 20, 1954, is an American author of children's books. Louis was born in East Meadow, New York, in 1954. When he was nine, he moved to Tustin, California. He went to college at the University of California at Berkeley and graduated in 1976, as an economics major. The next year, he wrote his first book, Sideways Stories from Wayside School . He was working at a sweater warehouse during the day and wrote at night. Almost a year later, he was fired from the job. He decided to go to law school. He attended Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. His first book was published while he was in law school. He graduated in 1980. For the next eight years he worked part-time as a lawyer and continued to try to write children's books. Then his books started selling well enough so that he was able to quit practicing law. His wife's name is Carla. When he first met her, she was a counselor at an elementary school. She was the inspiration behind the counselor in There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom . He was married in 1985. Hisdaughter, Sherre, was born in 1987.
My Review
Although essentially a children's book, I unashamedly enjoyed every sentence of this exquisitely crafted tale set in the desert in Texas. A boys detention centre has been built on the perimeter of a dried-up lake. The boy detainees rise at 04:30 and have to dig one five-foot-deep by five-foot-wide hole every day in the scorching sun. Stanley Yelnats, wrongly accused of stealing is the newest inmate and this is his story. The book also goes back 120 years to a time when the lake really was a lake and involves Stanley's great-grandfather and a dangerous outlaw called Kissing Kate Barlow. There is a real feelgood factor to this novel and I recommend this to every child up to the age of ninety.
