Author: Louis Sachar
Jacket Art: Vladimir Radunksy
Summary:
Holes is story about a young man named Stanley Yelnats (spelled the same backwards and forwards!) who is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Stanley is walking under an overpass when a pair of sneakers fall from the sky. Normally, Stanley may have just ignored the sneakers, however his father (also Stanley Yeltnats) is a struggling inventor who is trying to
come up with a way to rid smelly sneakers of their stench. Stanley starts home with sneakers just in time for a police officer to discover him and accuse him of stealing the sneakers from an orphanage who was about to auction them off. It turns out that these sneakers belonged to Clyde Livingston, a famous baseball player. As punishment, Stanley is given two choices, he could either go to jail or go to Camp Green Lake. Seeing that Stanley's family could never afford camp, he chose camp.Upon arriving at the camp, Stanley meets several other boys who go only by the nicknames X-Ray, Armpit, Zero, Magnet, Squid, and Zigzag. After only a few days Stanley is deemed "Caveman." At the camp, the boys must dig one hole each day out in what used to be the lake, but is now just a dry wasteland. Each hole must be five feet wide and five feet deep. While this is very difficult for Stanley at first, he soon becomes accustomed to it. When Stanley finds a metal cylinder with the initials "KB" on it, he gives it to X-Ray (the leader) and The Warden soon has the boys digging longer hours. It is evident to Stanley that they are digging for something, he is just unsure what.
Throughout the story, we discover that Stanley's family has been plagued with a curse that his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather earned. Stanley's distant grandfather was given a task to carry Madame Zeroni up a mountain to drink from a stream in exchange for the supplies to allow him to marry the girl of his dreams. When he failed at this, Madame Zeroni left a curse upon him and the rest of his decedents from that point on. What (our) Stanley does not realize is that the Zero he meets at camp is a decedent to Madame Zeroni and that he will have an opportunity to break the curse and find a buried treasure belonging to the first Stanley Yeltnats.
Compare/Contrast:
I truly enjoyed reading "Holes." I had read other stories by Louis Sachar in the past and loved them and was not disappointed with this one either! I am a hard judge when comparing books to movies because 99% of the time, the book is always better than the movie. Of course, this is only my opinion but with that opinion, this book is no different. The details that Louis Sachar provides during the book are exquisite. I can truly image how Stanley was feeling as he dug his first hole or discovered that Zero was a relative to Madame Zeroni. Another reason why I am always more partial to the books is because as I read, I develop a picture of what each of the characters look like and how each scenario plays out. When I watched the movie, I was surprised to see that Stanley was not overweight as Sachar had described in the book. Other details were also left out of the movie that I am sure were excluded due to time restraints and story fluidity. However, I would much rather have more details than not enough.
This being said, I think that the director and script writer did a suitable job transferring Sachar's story onto the big screen. Zero was one character that was exactly as I had pictured him when I saw the movie. Additionally, I think the elements that the movie provided that the book could not likely brought more of a younger audience to the movie than the book would have been able to. One example of this was the musical aspect of the movie. Additionally, the part of The Warden was played to a tee and she was just as menacing as I had hoped she would be. Overall, if I were to rate the book and movie on a scale of 1 to 10, I would give the book a 9 and the movie a 7.
Images courtesy of http://images.google.com.
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