Reader Response, February- Holes-

READER RESPONSE

Jan 15, 2011 Louis Sachar I am responding to Holes by Louis Sachar.I have read the book for the first time ever and it was absolutely fantastic! The text is fiction. I’ve read the entire book.

INTRODUCTION: The main character is Stanley Yelnats (protagonist) and the antagonist’s are The Warden and Mr.Sir and the text is fiction because it never happened and in my opinion is crazy and way to harsh. The setting is in a deserted desert like area and remains there the whole story. The conflict is that a bunch of teenagers have been arrested for doing something wrong such as stealing something or breaking into cars etc. All the boys have been given an option whether or not they want to go to jail or a detention center called Camp Green Lake where the bad boys go to build character by digging holes all day in extremely hot weather. When Stanley Yelnats gets arrested for stealing something important belonging to someone famous, ( you’ll have to read the book to find out) he chooses to go to Camp Green Lake. But as soon as he gets there, he realizes this is no camp. First of all, it has no camp like appearance, its so dry, there is no greenery, no trees, no life at all except human life, and there hasn’t been a single drop of water in the area for more than a hundred years ( this is because of a curse to the area a long, long time ago when it was a very small nice town with a whole lake full of water, if you want to learn more about that you have to read the book as I always say). Anyways, the owner of the area is a woman who everyone calls The Warden and another man who everyone calls Mr.Sir. There are six tents outside for different groups, they are tent A, B, C, D, E and group F. Stanley is put in group D. The other boys and Stanley have to wake up at 4 in the morning, eat breakfast and then dig holes 5 feet wide and 5 feet deep. What the boys don’t know is what used to be here before maybe 150 years ago and that The Warden isn’t making them dig hole’s to build character, but because she is looking for something that may be worth a lot or is something that was hidden by someone in the past. I was actually encouraged by almost everyone to read this book earlier this year and before that, everyone was shocked that i haven’t read this book and they would always tell me how good it was. After all that I finally decided to read it but i only read a couple of pages. After I realized i don’t have any other books to read I went for Holes once again. This time i read the whole book and regretted the fact that i didn’t read it before! It was such an amazing book, I couldn’t put it down! It was more than ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC!!!!!

RELATE: This book does not remind me of anything, it wasn’t like any other book I’ve ever read it was just so good! If i had to talk to someone I’d talk to Stanley, ( they call him Caveman in the book, everyone has nicknames) or another boy in the same group who everyone calls Zero because he can’t read or write and everyone makes fun of him calling him stupid and stuff. If I could talk to Stanley, I’d ask him why he didn’t tell the judge that he wasn’t the one that stole the ______ ( sorry can’t tell you what it was) it just happened to fall on him because someone threw it from the bridge he was crossing under at the time. I feel sorry for Zero that nobody likes him and teases him. If I were to talk to him, Id help him to read and write, which Stanley does do in the book at one point, then, i would ask him about his life, his mom,his dad,he said he didn’t have a mom, that she just left him when he was little. But I really want to meet all the characters and just chat with them because it would be a great opportunity to understand how everyone feels about life at the camp. Zero, Stanley and The Warden are three people that I think are interesting and play a big role in this book. Stanley has a very big role because he is the main character in the book and it’s based on mainly what Stanley thought of other’s, the camp and his miserable life. Zero is not much of a main character but he has a bigger role than the other boys in the camp other then Stanley, Zero, as I explained was never able to go to school or get taught because when he was little, his mom just abandoned him in a park so from then on, his future fell down the drain ( his dad was never mentioned and he has no family). The Warden, on the other hand was evil and just kept forcing the boys to dig holes just because she was looking for something. Eventually there are hundreds of holes everywhere and you cant walk a meter without avoiding a hole. The Warden in my opinion is also an important person because she is very bad and she rules the whole area and she has this snake poison in her nail polish so when someone like Mr. Sir makes her angry, she scratches that person and puts a very painful but not deadly poison into their skin and then that person begins to scream in awful pain for a while.At first when you read the book, it seems as if The Warden has some kind of relation with something that happened in the pat and she actually does, a very big relation that can get her rich instantly, only if she finds what the more then a hundred year old famous outlaw named Kissin’ Kate Barlow hid about five feet underground. ( ring a bell?). She is called Kissin’ Kate Barlow because if she kisses anyone, it means there dead, as in she will kill them. Kate Barlow is just her actual name. Another reason I liked Zero so much is because for example Stanley spells out a word and Zero really thinks hard to find out and then all of a sudden after a while when the topic is completely changed he just says the word aloud.

RETELL: The thing about this book that I really want to remember and admire the most out of all other books is that this is the only book I have ever read that really relies on a major event that happened in the past to keep the story so live and up and running. What I’m trying to say is that in this story the reader has to read and find out something that happened in the past that is badly affecting something in the story and must be solved. In this case it’s the fact that a famous outlaw had long ago hidden something that is important to the Warden and she will take any risk to get that treasure. But the end of the book reminded me of a saying that is “ Whatever goes around, comes around”. This is how this saying in my opinion applies to this part; a little more than halfway through the book, Zero is really badly made fun of and takes a shovel and slams it into one of the counselors face and then runs away. When Stanley begins to worry that he died, he goes out to look for him because he thinks that in the scorching heat he surely would have been fried to a crisp after a couple of days. Now this is where the author really shocked and took me in the book, when Mr.Sir comes to fill the boys’ canteen with water ( there is a large tank of water at the back of the pickup truck, this is when Stanley makes his move, he gets in to the pickup and roars down the desert, but unfortunately the holes made it near impossible for anyone to escape so it fell right into that hole so he decided to walk. To make a long story short Zero is found safe and sound so they go back to the camp and start to dig during midnight and finally find the treasure!!!! All of a sudden they are caught and then Stanley’s judges come and luckily the treasure is Stanley’s and Zero’s. Anyways the point is that The Warden went crazy trying to look for that treasure by ILLEGALLY making kids work like there’s no tomorrow, and she ended up getting nothing at all! All that illegal work for nothing huh? There were many parts where the author shocked me, like the one stated above.

REFLECT: As with every book I have ever read, this one also didn’t have a moral written in it but I thought of a couple myself. One of them was that if you try real hard and believe in yourself, you can accomplish almost anything and get out of almost any situation, like nothing is impossible. Another one was similar to the previous one ; Try your best, don’t look back, then you’ll realize how far you got. In the end of this book, no one dies but the Warden’s dream of finding the treasure has been taken by 2 tens who actually tried really hard and deserved what was in there ( money and expensive stones). As for the Warden, well of course she got nothing, she didn’t try, she got her “slaves” to do the work! I would definitely recommend this novel to everyone I couldn’t put it down! This book also won an award : JOHN NEWBERY MEDAL. I think it deserves it. This book was really effective in expressing emotion, the emotions were very real and it seemed just like it actually happened or as if it was based on a true story.