5420
Module 4 Newbery Award winners
Holes
By
Louis Sachar
Bibliography
Sachar, L. (2008). Holes.
New York: Frances Foster Books.
Summary
Stanley
Yelnats, whose last name is his first name spelled backwards, is a boy who is
in the wrong place at the wrong time. He
is falsely accused of stealing a famous athlete, Clyde “Sweet Feet”
Livingston’s shoes. He is sent to a
juvenile detention center, Camp Greenlake instead of being sent to jail. Camp Greenlake has the boys dig five foot
holes to build character. Stanley is
also overweight and is picked on by his classmates at school.
Stanley’s
family blames Stanley’s bad luck on his great-great grandfather, Elya
Yelnates. Elya was trying to woo a girl
with the help of a gypsy, Madame Zeroni, who had wanred Elya that the girl
would not be a good wife. Another man
was also pursuing the girl at the same time and he offeres the father his
heaviest pig in exchange for the daughter’s hand in marriage. Elya turns to Madame Zeroni for assistance
who gives him a small piglet. She
instructs him to take the pig up the mountain and sing to it and let it drink
from the stream at the top of the mountain every day and on the last day come
back for her and do the same thing. His pig does grow and the day before he is
to present the pig to the gir’s father, he ignores the instructionsa and not
onl doesn’t take the pig that day he doesn’t go bck for Madame Zeroni who had
promised to curse him and his family.
His pig ends up weighing the same, and he realizes that the girl
wouldn’t make a goof wife and gives it to the couple for a wedding gift. He then boarsds a ship to America but is
plagued with bad luck.
Stanley
makes friends with another loner at the camp, who the other boys call
Zero. His real name is Hector Zeroni,
but the connection is not made. Hector
just so happens to be the ancestor of Madame Zeroni.
Camp
Greenlake has a history that ends up intertwining itself with the Yelnats
family. The series of events that lead
to Camp Greenlake being a dried up desert in turn are what brings Stanley good
luck. How is the curse broken in a
desert when there are thousands of holes in the ground? Will his entire family be rid of the age-old
curse?
Review
Sutton, R. (1998, Sep/Oct). Holes. Horn Book
Magazine, 74(5), 593-595.
Louis Sachar has written an exceptionally funny, and heart-rending,
shaggy dog story of his own. With its breadth and ambition, Holes
may surprise a lot of Sachar
fans, but it shouldn't. With his Wayside School stories and — this reviewer's
favorite — the Marvin Redpost books, Sachar
has shown himself a writer of humor and heart, with an instinctive aversion to
the expected. Holes is filled with twists in the lane, moments when the
action is happily going along only to turn toward somewhere else that you
gradually, eventually, sometimes on the last page, realize was the truest
destination all along.
The book begins, "There is no lake
at Camp Green Lake," and we are immediately led into the mystery at the
core of the story: "There once was a very large lake here, the largest
lake in Texas." We soon learn that there is no camp here either, not
really, only a boys' detention facility to which our hero, Stanley Yelnats, is
headed. Stanley has been convicted of stealing a pair of shoes donated by
baseball great Clyde Livingston to a celebrity auction. The fact that Stanley
didn't steal the shoes, that indeed they fell from the sky onto his head, is
disbelieved by the judge, and even deemed immaterial by Stanley, who blames the
whole misadventure on his "no-good-dirty rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather!"
— a favorite family mantra. And as the book goes on to show, with great finesse
anci a virtuoso's display of circularity in action, Stanley is right. His
destiny is as palindromic as his name.
We soon learn about that pig-stealing
great-greatgrandfather and the curse that has haunted Stanley's family, even
though the hapless eider Yelnats, like Stanley, didn't steal anything, and the
curse is more of an ordination, a casting of the die. Stanley's
great-grandfather found his place in the pattern when he encountered Kissing
Kate Barlow, nee Miss Katherine Barlow, who became a ruthless outlaw of the
Wild West when her love for Sam, the Onion Man, became cause for small-town
opprobrium — and murder. Miss Barlow's recipe for spiced peaches also plays a
large part in the story.
Heck, it all plays a large part in the
story. Those peaches show up more than a century after they were canned, and
their efficacy remains unchallenged. Just like Sam's onions. Just like the
lullaby, sung, with telling variations, by the Yelnats cian:
"If
only, if only," the woodpecker sighs, "The bark
on the tree was as soft as the skies."
While the wolf
waits below, hungry and lonely, Crying to the
moo-oo-oon,
"If only, if only."
As for the title: when Stanley gets to
Camp Green Lake, he discovers that every day each boy, each inmate, must dig a hole five feet by five feet by five
feet. (Why? Too bad you can't ask Kissing Kate Barlow.) Stanley makes a friend,
Zero (nicknamed thus because this is exactly what the world finds him to be),
with whom he eventually escapes the camp. These boys have a date with destiny
and, trust me, it has everything to do with the pig, Kissing Kate, the lullaby,
the peaches, the onions… even the sneakers, Sachar is masterful at bringing his realistic story and tall-tale
motifs together, using a simple declarative style —
Stanley Yelnats was given a choice. The
judge said, "You may go to jail, or you may go to Camp Green Lake."
Stanley was from a poor family. He had
never been to camp before.
— that is all the more poignant, and
funny, for its understatement, its willingness to stay out of the way.
We haven't seen a book with this much
plot, so suspensefully and expertly deployed, in too long a time. And the
ending will make you cheer — for the happiness the Yelnats family finally finds
— and cry, for the knowledge of how they lost so much for so long, all in the
words of a lullaby. Louis Sachar has long been a great and deserved
favorite among children, despite the benign neglect of critics. But Holes
is witness to its own theme: what goes around, comes around. Eventually.
My
impressions
This book was very entertaining and did
have funny parts. The way the different
experiences of the characters are all related is clever and kept me wondering
while I read.
What
I would do with it in the library
This could be used to introduce different
cultures and how they view superstitions and how they view the manifestation of
bad luck.
Out of the Dust
By
Karen Hesse
Bibliography
Hesse,
K. (1997). Out of the dust. New York: Scholastic Press.
Summary
Written in short sections of prose, a girl
named Billie Jo, describes life in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl from
1934-1935. When Billie Jo is 14, her
mother becomes pregnant after many pregnancies before, but this one seems to be
progressing. One day, her mother
accidentally picks up a can of kerosene instead of water. She runs out of the house to get her husband,
and Billie Jo, trying to get rid of the kerosene so that the house doesn’t
catch on fire, throws it out the back door right onto her mom. Trying to help save her and the unborn child,
Billie Jo works to save them, getting severely burned hands in the process. They both end up dying and Billie Jo’s hands
are so burned it prevents her from playing piano which she loves.
She
and her dad drift apart and she runs away from home. She finds out later that her hands can be
easily fixed. She goes home and is
worried a a spot on her dad’s face which looks like the skin cancer that her
grandfather had died from.
Reviews
Lindsay, N. (2005, April). Out of the Dust. School Library
Journal, 51(4), 56.
In 1934 dustbowl Oklahoma,
14-year-old Billie Jo has aspirations that extend far beyond her bleak setting.
But these aspirations wither as her pregnant mother dies in a terrible accident
involving a fire that also scars Billie Jo's hands beyond use. Details of daily
life and of the teen's growing awareness of the wider world are made vividly
clear through Hesse's conversational free verse.
Sieruta, P. D. (1998, Jan/Feb). Out
of the Dust. Horn Book Magazine, 74(1), 73-74.
Prairie winds dark with dust blow through
this novel — turning suppers gritty, burying tractors, and scouring lungs. Even
the pages of the book, composed solely of first-person, free-verse poems, have
a windswept appearance as fourteen-year-old Billie Jo Kelby relates her
Depression-era experiences in the Oklahoma panhandle: "We haven't had a
good crop in three years, / not since the bounty of '31, / and we're all
whittled down to the bone these days." Billie Jo's world is further devastated
when a kitchen fire causes the deaths of her mother and newborn brother and
severely injures her hands, stalling the fledgling pianist's dream of a music
career. A few of the poems are pretentious in tone or facile in execution, and
some of the longer, narrative-driven pieces strain at the free verse structure,
but the distinctive writing style is nonetheless remarkably successful. Filled
with memorable images — such as Billie Jo's glimpse of her pregnant mother
bathing outdoors in a drizzle — the spare verses showcase the poetry of
everyday language; the pauses between line breaks speak eloquently, if
sometimes melodramatically. The focus of the entire book is not quite as
concise. As tragedies pile up over the two-year timeline (a plague of grasshoppers
descends, starving cattle need to be shot, Billie Jo's father develops skin
cancer), the pace becomes slightly numbing. Billie Jo's aborted escape from the
dust bowl
almost gets lost in the procession of bleak events, instead of serving as the
book's climax. Yet her voice, nearly every word informed by longing, provides
an immediacy that expressively depicts both a grim historical era and one
family's healing.
My thoughts
Out of the Dust mad for interesting
reading because of the way it is written in prose. It was an easy read, and because of the short
passages of prose, it didn’t feel as much like a chore. I liked seeing events and effects of the Dust
Bowl through Billie Jo’s eyes.
Uses in the library
This could be paired with a
non-fiction selection about the Dust Bowl and even parts of The Grapes
of Wrath could be read to give a rounded view of it.
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