Holes

Following a miscarriage of justice, the ever-unlucky Stanley Yelnats is sentenced to imprisonment at a boys' juvenile detention center known as Camp Green Lake. There's just one thing about Camp Green Lake--there's no lake, just a dried-up lake bed in which, every day, each boy must dig a hole five feet deep and five feet across. The sadistic warden claims that digging the holes helps the boys build character, but that's nothing more than a lie--and it's up to Stanley and his fellow prisoners to dig up the truth about why the warden really wants them to perform this task. Recipient of the 1999 Newbery Medal.

"...[a] rugged, engrossing adventure." - (Kirkus, 6/15/98)

"...a smart jigsaw puzzle of a novel that middle-grade readers will want to solve on their own....Tough, truehearted and ultimately tender, 'Holes' is also a member of that endangered species, the family read aloud." - David H. Elliot (New York Times Book Review, 11/15/98)

Gr 5-8-Stanley Yelnats IV has been wrongly accused of stealing a famous baseball player's valued sneakers and is sent to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention home where the boys dig holes, five feet deep by five feet across, in the miserable Texas heat. It's just one more piece of bad luck that's befallen Stanley's family for generations as a result of the infamous curse of Madame Zeroni. Overweight Stanley, his hands bloodied from digging, figures that at the end of his sentence, he'll "...either be in great physical condition or else dead." Overcome by the useless work and his own feelings - (School Library Journal, 9/1/98)

This wry and loopy novel about a camp for juvenile delinquents in a dry Texas desert (once the largest lake in the state) by the author of There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom and the Wayside School series has some serious undercurrents. Stanley Yelnats (appropriately enough for a story about reversals, the protagonist's name is a palindrome) gets sent to Camp Green Lake to do penance, "a camp for bad boys." Never mind that Stanley didn't commit the crime he has been convicted of he blames his bad luck on his "no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather." He digs five-foot-deep h - (Publishers Weekly, 7/27/98)

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