Holes by Louis Sachar

Title:  Holes

Author: Louis Sachar

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Publish date: 2000

ISBN: 9 781408 865231

Another one for the admirable-YA-books pile. I have some recollection of seeing the movie of this, but the text was a considerably more memorable and pleasurable.

Hapless kid from hapless family gets sent to a boot-camp when wrongly convicted of petty theft. Forms friendships, and perhaps ironically ‘builds character’ because this is the (presumably fallacious) opinion of the detention center staff. In process of caring for others, rectifies an ancestral wrong, all ends well.

It’s a lovely, satisfying read. The touch is light, and often lyrical, despite portraying characters who use shoulder-shrugs more than words. The pieces are put together in as obvious a manner as possible, and even if you’re a kid with no thought to literary craft or linguistic techniques, you can’t help but connect the themes and the images that the author puts your way. Even if you don’t register them as such.

Sachar claims this is about friendship, and the importance of reading. For me the strongest motif that really ties all the strands together is the discovery of self – in this case, the reconciliation to the ancestors who emigrated from their home countries to the new continent all those years ago. The psyche of the States is continually in a state of yearning for a past it feels has eluded it. A massive nation of people whose very existence is owed to leaving their origins behind, coupled with the main theme of adolescence, a search for the self, creates a thumping rhythm of hammering away at the strands of ‘mystery’ in the novel. 

The recurring motifs of the song, the carrying, the 'training’ and changing physical form, the peaches, the onions, the pig, the lizards, the rattlesnakes, and of course, the holes. Holes in every physical and metaphorical sense. These are clear, unambiguous sign-posts for a friendly, sympathetic read.

Why not give it a five moose-hoof up? No reason at all.