I must admit, I've seen the movie Holes a few times and loved it. That is what prompted me to read the book. After all, books that are made into movies are usually much better than the movies they are made into! (Take Jurassic Park, for instance, and Harry Potter...though I do love the Harry Potter movies!) I would have to say that in the case of Holes the movie and the book are about equal! The person who wrote the screenplay made such few and minor changes that the book and the movie are practically the same! I love them both and am thinking about using them in one of my classes this year! So, on with the synopsis!
Stanley Yelnats is a pudgy(in the book, not the movie), unlucky, awkward boy. He doesn't have too many friends and gets picked on a lot...usually by boys much smaller than him. After fishing his notebook out of a toilet at the end of school, he misses his bus and starts to walk home. As he is walking home, a pair of sneakers fly off of an overpass and hit him in the head. Because his father is trying to invent a way to recycle old sneakers (another difference between the book and movie) he sees this as destiny.
And it is destiny in a way. He get stopped by cops, who nab him for stealing the shoes from a homeless shelter, where they were going to be auctioned off for thousands of dollars as they belonged to a very famous baseball player. He ends up at Camp Green Lake, a "camp for bad boy". Every day (including weekends and holidays) at Camp Green Lake every boy get a shovel, is marched into the vast wasteland that used to be Green Lake, and has to dig a 5-foot deep hole with a 5-foot diameter. They dig holes to build character...or do they? Stanley starts to think they are really looking for something...but what?
This is a wonderful book with a touch of the fantastic. One of its prime messages is that good things come to good people, regardless of their luck or what they come from.
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