A real page-turner (Holes - Louis Sachar)

Member Name: frannyfortune

Product:	Holes - Louis Sachar
Date:	09/05/01 (904 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: exciting, complex, very readable

Disadvantages: could frighten a younger reader, only in hardback at present

This book has attracted a lot of media attention and won some prestigious prizes. On reading it recently, I saw what all the fuss was about. 'Holes' is a highly original plot-driven novel for readers who are ready to go beyond Harry Potter and Jacqueline Wilson. A bright 10-year-old would enjoy this, but it would not be too childish for an imaginative teenager (and certainly had this 29-year-old enthralled!)

Sidney Yelnats (yes, his name is a palindrome, and yes, it does become integral to the plot in a bizarre way) has been sent to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile offenders institution, for a crime which he did not commit. The Camp, rather than the liberal rehabilitation unit that its name suggests, is more like a concentration camp in which the staff are in more need of help than the inmates.

"If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy."

Camp Green Lake's basic philosophy. Or is it? Certainly that is the motive presented to the boys for their pointless-seeming labour (and my word, do they dig some holes - back-breaking work under the merciless desert sun - probably the most harrowing part of the book), but we quickly become aware of a hidden agenda. What exactly is the Warden (surely one of the most terrifying characters in children's fiction, with her deadly fingernails and feminine wiles, literary sister to the White Witch of Narnia and Mrs. Coulter from the His Dark Materials trilogy), hoping the boys will uncover?

Several layers of narrative run simultaneously throught the book, separated by time and space but drawing ever-closer until we at last discover the whole picture. Each plot strand has its own impetus, so that when the focus changes I felt very frustrated and could only read on and on, desperate to discover what would happen. Definitely an "I just couldn't put it down" book.

The relationships between the boys an
d the slightly 'Lord of the Flies' hierarchy they create at the Camp are drawn tersely but effectively. Sacher uses few words to create realistic characters, then equally simply confounds your expectations of those characters. Its a challenging book in many ways, not for very sensitive children who could be distressed by the dangerous and frightening situations the boys find themselves in, but also with messages of tolerance and hope that could leave the most hard-bitten teenager pondering.

There are so many reasons I enjoyed this book. The quirkiness, the in-jokes, the surreal fatalism which put me in mind of Richard Brautigan's writing. But most of all, the supremely satisfying happy ending which you hardly ever seem to find in children's books these days!

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