Top 100 Children’s Novels (#6)

Perfect in every way. – Aaron Zenz

Pitch perfect. – Katie Fee, Associate Marketing Manager, Bloomsbury Children’s Books and Walker Books for Young Readers

A perfect story arc with a main character we all feel for, a mystery and a great cast of supporting characters. – Heather Meagher Stanley

Another one of my titles that will be scratching and clawing for the #1 spot on the final list. It is widely considered the best Newbery of all time, simply because it is a perfect book! – DaNae (The Librariest)

WHY? Because there is no lake at Camp Green Lake and Stanley Yelnats spelled backwards is…Stanley Yelnats. There has never been and may never be a book that perfectly combines literary excellence and popularity. – Walter M. Mayes

THIS one at least is definitely Best quality-wise as well as merely Favorite. I’m sort of sad that I can never read it for the first time again, to watch it all come together; but I reread it often enough happily anyway. It’s one of my books-I-read-as-a-writer-so-I-can-learn-how-to-plot-from-it. Unfortunately usually it just puts me into despair that I can never ever possibly create a book as perfectly crafted as all that. – A.M. Weir (Amy’s Library of ROCK)

Read through each one of these comments and one word comes up over and over again.  "Perfect".  Perfectly crafted, perfectly combines literary excellence and popularity, perfect perfect perfect.  I cannot help but agree.  Heck, my husband cannot help but agree.  We’re Holes fans through and through.  It’s also the book that makes me hungry for onions. I know that’s weird, but I get a real craving for them after reading Holes.

The synopsis from the publisher reads, "As further evidence of his family’s bad fortune, which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish boys’ juvenile detention center in the Texas desert. As punishment, the boys here must each dig a hole every day, five feet deep and five feet across. Ultimately, Stanley ‘digs up the truth’ — and through his experience, finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself. Winner of the 1998 National Book Award for young people’s literature, here is a wildly inventive, darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment — and redemption."

Part of the inspiration for the book is explained to Leonard Marcus in Funny Business: Conversations with Writers of Comedy. Said former Fuller Brush man Sachar, "when I start a book, I don’t make a plan. I don’t know where I’m going with it. It just try to find something that intrigues me enough to write about it for at least a week. With Holes I began with the camp. That came out of the fact that I had recently moved from San Francisco to Texas, where it’s so hot in summer and summer lasts forever. I was writing about the heat. Lake Travis is not too far from Austin, and I imagined it being so hot that Lake Travis dried up . . . I got the idea for a juvenile correction camp before I had any characters. And I had Stanley’s great-great-grandfather before I ever got to Stanley." Misery breeds creativity. Love it.  He then rewrote it five times before giving it to his editor Frances Foster.

The original title of the book was going to be Wrong Time, Wrong Place, Wrong Kid. Holes sounded more serious, however, so that’s what they went with. Good call.  Also Kissing Kate Barlow is, understandably, his favorite character.

On my own part, I’m a particular fan of the lizard/pit/warden standoff at the end of the book. I love the movie to pieces, but if I’d been in charge of the music I would’ve put in the standoff theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly there.

The combination of kid-friendly storytelling that children go gaga for and writing so good that it makes adult critics practically pant is rare. So rare that Holes became one of the very few titles out there to win a Newbery and a National Book Award for Young Person’s Literature at the same time.  Anita Silvey goes farther and calls the book "a rare winner of the triple crown in children’s literature (National Book Award, Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and Newbery Medal)."  This almost never happens and when it does it must be for a pretty remarkable book. There was only one Newbery Honor the year Holes came out and that was A Long Way from Chicago (#64 on the top 100 novels countdown).

There was a sequel called Small Steps that followed the character of Armpit. It was a perfectly serviceable book, but any title that had to follow Holes was going to have a pretty hard row to hoe.  Slate Magazine talked a bit about it, within the context of Sachar’s other books, here.