{"id":704,"date":"2006-03-07T19:51:32","date_gmt":"2006-03-08T00:51:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/?p=704"},"modified":"2006-03-22T19:59:43","modified_gmt":"2006-03-23T00:59:43","slug":"holes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2006\/03\/07\/holes\/","title":{"rendered":"Holes"},"content":{"rendered":"

1999 Newbery Medal Winner: Holes, by Louis Sachar<\/p>\n\nThe Plot<\/b>
\nAfter being (wrongly) convicted of theft, Stanley Yelnats chooses what he hopes to be the lesser of two evils: to serve out his sentence at a correctional camp. But once at the camp, Stanley finds that he may have been wrong. All of the boys there are tasked to every day dig out a hole 5′ in diameter and 5′ deep. This will supposedly teach them to be better people and become productive members of society. But it turns out this has a lot less to do with reforming wayward boys than it does with Stanley’s great-grandfather.<\/p>\n

My Thoughts<\/b>
\nBeing neither a child nor a parent when this book first came out, I first heard of its existence when I saw a movie poster up at the theatre. From the poster and from what little I ever heard about the movie (I never saw one single preview for it, which is odd, to say the least), I had developed an idea in my mind of what the book was about. This was pretty much completely wrong.<\/p>\n

I also heard that there was a character in the book called ‘Armpit’ (true), which prejudiced me still further against it. I am not a fan of the sort of humor the inclusion of such a name signalled.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for me, it turns out there wasn’t much of that sort of humor in the book at all, in spite of having a cast predominantly formed of teenaged boys. The plot itself was also complex for a book of this nature, and required the reader to connect events in three different time periods. First, the pig-stealing activities of Stanley’s great-great-grandfather, then the tragic life of the bandit Kissin Kate Barlow, and finally Stanley’s experience at the camp.<\/p>\n

That events in all three time periods were going to collide was apparent from page one (why include them if they’re not important?), but there were at least a few unexpected twists. For example, I’m willing to bet that at least 80% of readers think at some point that the Warden is a descendant of Kate Barlow.<\/p>\n

The book was not perfect — Stanley’s reluctance to try and teach Zero how to read rang false to me; even internally he seemed to be rejecting the idea because he felt he’d be a bad teacher, and that just didn’t make much sense. Why would he think that if he’d never tried it? There was no textual evidence that he’d found his teaching skills lacking in the past. But aside from that, it was good, and the resolution was nice and snappy without any artificial delay imposed by the author.\n<\/pracut>\n

In Short<\/b>
\nWhile I’ve heard mixed reviews about the recently published sequel to Holes, and while I have no real desire to pick it up and evaluate it for myself, Holes itself was a pleasant surprise. I went in expecting something more akin to Lord of the Flies and found a nicely plotted novel with a slight hint of mystery. Recommended. 9\/10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1999 Newbery Medal Winner: Holes, by Louis Sachar The Plot After being (wrongly) convicted of theft, Stanley Yelnats chooses what he hopes to be the lesser of two evils: to serve out his sentence at a correctional camp. But once at the camp, Stanley finds that he may have been wrong. All of the boys […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}