Book – Holes
Author – Louis Sachar
Year – 1998
Genre – Children’s
Pages – 241
For those of you who don’t know, this September I started a new job. I am now training to become an English teacher. All these years of reading plenty of books has paid off. There is a certain irony to the fact that I now have such little time to read for pleasure nowadays when it is something that I try and persuade teenagers to do, but the one thing I do need to do is read the books that I will be teaching to students. Whilst this means that I may have a little less choice in the matter of what I am reading at the moment, there is no reason to not include any of these books that I read here on the Book Challenge, is there? Oh yes, I make the rules up don’t I? Well, review them I shall then.
I actually read Holes during the first Book Challenge in 2009 (the one that I failed at so miserably) and quite liked it. It is a story about Stanley Yelnats (see if you can find the literary trick in the name… sorry, teacher mode there) who is sent to a camp for young offenders for stealing a pair of sneakers. It transpires that this is not a normal camp, but instead the campers are forced to dig a five foot hole each day. Stanley suspects that something is up – and of course for the sake of plot, there is.
It’s a cracking book for kids with some great characters, a lovely series of chapters that intersperse the current day with the same place a hundred or so years before, and is also a great book to teach – I managed to put together some great lessons for my Year Sevens based on this one, and imagine I will probably teach it again in the future.
8/10