21. Holes

By Louis Sachar

My daughter really enjoyed Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game and requested more mystery books for her birthday. I googled "best YA mystery books like The Westing Game" and Louis Sachar's Holes showed up as one of 'em.

The kid gulped down Holes (and The Tattooed Potato) not long after her birthday, learned in the afterword a movie adaptation exists and promptly informed her parents that we should all watch it as a family. Her bookish parents said, well, maybe we should read the book first... well, after trying to wait patiently for about a week, she pretty much demanded that we watch Holes for our movie night (double-billed with my choice for Gremlins 2 since Halloween was approaching).

I had never in my life heard of Holes the movie before, so I was a little wary until I saw some raving Letterboxd reviews. We were all pleasantly surprised at how good the movie was. I realize now the love for this movie comes from Millennials who grew up with Holes. For Gen X parents with a Gen Z kid, this made an excellent family movie.

I ended up reading Holes about a couple of weeks later, and I can now say the movie adaptation was surprisingly faithful to the novel.  It kept the non-linear structure where it jumped back in time to Stanley’s great-great-grandfather and back to current events and then back to the story of Kissin Kate Barlow and Sam the Onion Seller.  I was surprised that the Warden’s snake venom-tainted nail polish scene was in the book – it was so nasty how she scratched Mr Sir’s face with her painted nails!

I might as well write a quick summary:  Stanley lives in a big city and gets caught with a stolen pair of used shoes donated by a famous baseball player, only he didn't steal them.  He gets sent to a remote detention centre in the middle of nowhere that's overseen by the Warden, a wealthy woman whose family has owned the land for generations.  It's called Camp Green Lake because there used to be a lake over a century ago but it's now just parched barren desert.  The boys are all forced to dig one big hole each day to "build character" but there is a nefarious reason that only the Warden knows.  The land is perforated with hundreds and hundreds of five-foot wide and five-foot deep holes.  Stanley gradually gets used the physical demands of the daily hole-digging and becomes one of the boys.  He makes friends with the very quiet Zero, a very bright but illiterate boy. We also learn that Stanley had a great-great-grandfather in Latvia who was cursed by a fortune teller before he immigrated to America because he broke a promise. When Stanley's great-great-grandfather was travelling from New York to Texas, he was robbed by Kiss Kate Barlow.  Ever since then, Stanley's family has always had bad luck.  Stanley's father is a struggling inventor obsessed with finding a cure for foot odor.  When Stanley finds a small object in one of his digs, this sets off a chain of events.  The reader gradually learns that there is a connection between Stanley's family history, the barren land at Camp Green Lake, the Warden, and the boy known as Zero.  Some adventure ensues, and everything gets explained at the end with a satisfying conclusion.

One main difference was that Clyde Livingston was a baseball player in the book, while in the movie, he was a basketball star (which actually makes more sense as basketball has become the more popular sport).  The ending was also slightly different.  In the movie, the storm scene was made more dramatic by having it rain down on all the characters at the Camp Green Lake compound.  In the book, the rain only started as Stanley and Zero/Hector were driving away from Camp Green Lake in the lawyer’s car.

The book was as enjoyable and fun as the movie.  There are many characters and a lot of stuff going on with the nonlinear plot that is fairly complex for a YA novel.  Sachar mentioned how it was important for him to make it digestible and appealing for a 10-11 year old, and he pretty much succeeds in tying up all the loose ends.  I can now understand why my daughter was so impatient to watch the movie after she finished the book.  I heard that Sigourney Weaver wanted to star in Holes the movie because her daughter was also a big fan.

Louis Sachar seems like a genuinely nice, personable guy.  I liked his notes at the end, when he mentioned how Holes was very popular at juvenile detention centers, and he’d received fan mail from the kids there.  He also admitted that he only learned that you can’t actually dig a hole 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide using a five-foot shovel until the movie was being made. There was no room for the actors to swing their shovels!