Holes
By: Louis Sachar
Holes is a fictional novel for children and young adults. This novel won the 1998 U.S. National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the 1999 Newbery Medal for the year’s “most distinguished contribution to American literature for children”, and was made into a Walt Disney Pictures film in 2003.
Holes is a story about a boy named Stanley Yelnates who is cursed with bad luck. He has been unjustly sent to a boy’s detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by digging holes everyday. Over the course of the novel, Stanley tries to dig up the truth about Camp Green Lake, meets a true friend, and tries to break his family’s curse.
As a teacher, you could use a snippet of this novel to introduce Newbery Medal winning books. You could also use this book to talk about imagery, figurative language, and other literary techniques. Overall, this book is exciting to read and difficult to put down. Regardless of whether you use this book in the classroom or not, it is still a must read and should be apart of your book collection! Below is a snippet from the book.
Stanley was arrested later that day.
He looked at the guard who sat slumped in his seat and wondered if he had fallen asleep. The guard was wearing sunglasses, so Stanley couldn’t see his eyes. Stanley was not a bad kid. He was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. He’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was all because of this no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather. He smiled. It was a family joke. Whenever anything went wrong, they always blamed Stanley’s no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather.
Supposedly, he had a great-great-grandfather who stole a pig from a one-legged Gypsy, and she put a curse on him and all his decedents. Stanley and his parents didn’t believe in curses, of course, but whenever anything went wrong, it felt good to blame someone.
Things went wrong a lot. They always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He looked out the window at the vast emptiness. He watched the rise and fall of the telephone wire. In his mind he could hear his father’s gruff voice softly singing to him.
“If only, if only,” the woodpecker sighs,
“The bark on the tree was a little bit softer.”
While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely,
He cries to the moo-oo-oon,
“If only, if only.”