Holes
by Louis Sachar
call number: JF SACHAR L.
A darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment Stanley Yelnat's 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 center, Camp Green
Lake. There is no lake - it has been dry for over a hundred years - and
it's hardly a camp. As punishment, the boys must each dig a hole a day,
five feet deep, five feet across, in the hard earth of the dried-up lake
bed. The warden claims that this pointless labor builds character, but
she is really using the boys to dig for loot buried by the Wild West
outlaw Kissin' Kate Barlow. The story of Kissin' Kate, and of a curse
put on Stanley's great-great-grandfather by a one-legged gypsy, weaves a
narrative puzzle that tangles and untangles, until it becomes clear
that the hand of fate has been at work in the lives of the characters -
and their forebears - for generations.
Holes is a 1998 New York Times Book
Review Notable Children's Book of the Year and the winner of the 1998
National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the 1999 Boston Globe
- Horn Book Award for Fiction and the 1999 Newbery Medal.
Tales of a fourth grade nothing