Oh my goodness, look at that, I haven't posted for almost two months!
How horrifyingly embarassing.
Holes happens to be a book that I personally think is awesome. It won the Newbery medal, which is, as far as I know, an award given in the USA to what the judges think is the best children's book of the year.
Don't quit reading this in disgust after the term "children's book", because a lot of those books are targeted towards teenagers as well, and even adults enjoy them.
Okay, so if you're not convinced...well, here's the review I posted on Goodreads last year.
When I read this book, I decided that it totally deserved that Newbery Medal.
Holes is the story of Stanley Yelnats IV, a singularly unlucky guy from a singularly unlucky family. His family was supposedly cursed when Stanley's no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather broke a promise to a fortune teller.
His dad is an inventor trying to invent a way for shoes not to smell. When a pair of shoes falls out of the sky and hits him on the head, he thinks it's fate. Maybe his luck is changing...
Apparently not. Those shoes once belonged to legendary baseball player, Clyde Livingstone, called Sweetfeet.
Stanley is given a choice- jail or Camp Green Lake. He chooses Camp Green Lake.
There's no lake at Camp Green Lake, a 'correctional facility' in the middle of the dry Texas desert.
Once, the desert used to be a lake, and there was a town. The schoolteacher there, Katherine Barlow, fell in love with an African American onion-seller named Sam. When the townspeople found out, they shot dead Sam.
The sheriff refused to help, and asked Katherine for a kiss instead.
Three days after Sam was killed, Miss Barlow shot the sheriff and left a lipstick mark on his forehead.
She became the feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and the lake dried up. Twenty years later, when confronted by two people she once knew, she refused to tell anyone where the money she's stolen was.
They could dig holes in the desert for a hundred years, and they wouldn't find the treasure anywhere. Soon after saying this, Kate died from the bite of a poisonous yellow-spotted lizard, laughing.
If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, he becomes a good boy. And that's what happens at Camp Green Lake. The strange Mr. Sir and the mysterious, intimidating Warden make the boys dig a hole every single day. There aren't any fences or walls- because the camp is the only place that has water for miles around. It's a prison.
The boys at Camp Green Lake all have nicknames, and soon Stanley's new name is Caveman. The boy he becomes the closest to is Zero, a quiet boy who everyone dismisses as stupid. When Zero runs away, Stanley wants to find out what happened, and follows him.
Although he doesn't know it, running after Zero will lead to the breaking of two curses- the Yelnats family curse and the curse on Green Lake.
This was a really well-written, captivating book. I stay with my statement- it totally deserved the Newbery Medal it got.
Yes, I'm serious, Stanley and his family refer to his great-great-grandfather as his *deep breath* 'no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather'.
It's engrossing and funny and a really good book, so I recommend you read it at the first chance you get!
How horrifyingly embarassing.
Holes happens to be a book that I personally think is awesome. It won the Newbery medal, which is, as far as I know, an award given in the USA to what the judges think is the best children's book of the year.
Don't quit reading this in disgust after the term "children's book", because a lot of those books are targeted towards teenagers as well, and even adults enjoy them.
Okay, so if you're not convinced...well, here's the review I posted on Goodreads last year.
When I read this book, I decided that it totally deserved that Newbery Medal.
Holes is the story of Stanley Yelnats IV, a singularly unlucky guy from a singularly unlucky family. His family was supposedly cursed when Stanley's no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather broke a promise to a fortune teller.
His dad is an inventor trying to invent a way for shoes not to smell. When a pair of shoes falls out of the sky and hits him on the head, he thinks it's fate. Maybe his luck is changing...
Apparently not. Those shoes once belonged to legendary baseball player, Clyde Livingstone, called Sweetfeet.
Stanley is given a choice- jail or Camp Green Lake. He chooses Camp Green Lake.
There's no lake at Camp Green Lake, a 'correctional facility' in the middle of the dry Texas desert.
Once, the desert used to be a lake, and there was a town. The schoolteacher there, Katherine Barlow, fell in love with an African American onion-seller named Sam. When the townspeople found out, they shot dead Sam.
The sheriff refused to help, and asked Katherine for a kiss instead.
Three days after Sam was killed, Miss Barlow shot the sheriff and left a lipstick mark on his forehead.
She became the feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and the lake dried up. Twenty years later, when confronted by two people she once knew, she refused to tell anyone where the money she's stolen was.
They could dig holes in the desert for a hundred years, and they wouldn't find the treasure anywhere. Soon after saying this, Kate died from the bite of a poisonous yellow-spotted lizard, laughing.
If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, he becomes a good boy. And that's what happens at Camp Green Lake. The strange Mr. Sir and the mysterious, intimidating Warden make the boys dig a hole every single day. There aren't any fences or walls- because the camp is the only place that has water for miles around. It's a prison.
The boys at Camp Green Lake all have nicknames, and soon Stanley's new name is Caveman. The boy he becomes the closest to is Zero, a quiet boy who everyone dismisses as stupid. When Zero runs away, Stanley wants to find out what happened, and follows him.
Although he doesn't know it, running after Zero will lead to the breaking of two curses- the Yelnats family curse and the curse on Green Lake.
This was a really well-written, captivating book. I stay with my statement- it totally deserved the Newbery Medal it got.
Yes, I'm serious, Stanley and his family refer to his great-great-grandfather as his *deep breath* 'no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather'.
It's engrossing and funny and a really good book, so I recommend you read it at the first chance you get!
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