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Holes

Holes

List Price: $6.50
Your Price: $5.85
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Keeper of a book
Review: This is the greatest realistic fiction book of all time. If youare a movie writer please turn this book into a movie.

P.S.Thisbook is greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaat!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I loved this book!
Review: This is the most interesting and fun book I have ever read!!! I read and read and read until my mom told me to stop reading. I watched the movie after reading it, but the book is much, much better!!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Louis sachar- Another Hit!
Review: This is the most outrageous bok, that makes you feel like you are really there! It is like you cant stop reading! This deserved the Newberry Honor so much, because I really don't read that much, but as I read this, i read 100 pages every day. It improved my reading skills, so now i can read a lot, every single night. Everyone has to read this book, it teaches you a great lesson!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Wonderfully detailed and relistic
Review: This is the right choice Stanley convinced himself. It had to be better than jail. Stanley had been convicted of stealing. He knew he was innocent but was somehow proven guilty. He was on his way to Camp Green Lake. Once Camp Green Lake was a lake, the largest lake in Texas in fact. But, now it was just a huge, dusty, hot, desert used as a disiplinary camp for the underaged trouble-makers of Texas. Louis Sachar was very detailed in explaining how horrible it was for the people at Camp Green Lake. It was realistic the way he made it, you felt like you were digging holes in 110 degree weather.
Each day the so called "campers" of Camp Green Lake were forced to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet wide. No one knew why either. But the warden is a little suspicous.
The story is strange but written in a cool way. It makes you believe everything he says.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: NEEDS 100 STARS!
Review: This is the world's best book! I'm a huge fan of Wayside School and I did my book report on Holes. I got a 100 and everyone in my class wants it. Even the school librarian envies me!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An exceptional book.
Review: This is, most likely, one of my favourite books of all time. It's the kind of book that you sit down to read... and you don't get up again until you're finished a few hours later, and your legs have fallen asleep and your eyes hurt but it really is worth it.
Holes is basically about Stanley Yelnats, who goes to Camp Greenlake, a juvenile correction facility (or whatever you call them) because he supposedly stole a pair of incredibly valuable sneakers. At Camp Greenlake, where there is no lake, they are made to dig holes, five feet wide and five feet deep, every day out where the lake used to be to "build character."
But after a while it becomes apparent that they're not just digging to build character, but because the Warden's looking for something...
But besides the main plot, there are so many sort of sub-plots that seem to be going on, and every single little detail that you kept thinking was so pointless really does matter, and all these details and plot threads tie in at the end in such a creative way that you just want to jump up and scream "Yes!" before reading the book again. And again. And again...
So overall, Holes is one of those books with something interesting going on in every sentence. It's the kind of book that is so exceptionally awesome you feel all tingly inside. If you've borrowed it to read, you go and buy a copy. It's that good. Now go read it. You'll be glad you did.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: What a great book (for everyone)!
Review: This may be a Newbury Award winner for children's literature, but I'm 23 and it kept me interested and in suspense the whole time. The interlacing of the two stories, the present centering around Stanly and the past centering around the "ancient" Green Lake its seedy past, are perfect and masterful. The characters are simply done, but they have a massive dynamic, taking on a whole new life after "building character." It's a great adventure, a riveting drama, a raucous comedy and has one of the most satisfying and redeming endings I've read in any novel, current or classic. This is great for every reader of every age. I give it my highest recommendation possible!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Book for All Ages
Review: This novel grabs the attention of the reader from the first page. The plot revolves around a boys' detention center. Stanley Yelnats, an overweight teenager, finds himself unjustly sentenced to Camp Green Lake. Stanley is convinced that his bad luck is caused by a curse put on one of his ancestors generations earlier in Latvia. The warden and her sadistic guards force the boys to dig holes in the desert day after day. Stanley comes to the conclusion that the warden is looking for something in the desert. Through a series of flashbacks spread throughout the book, the reader is told what the warden is so interested in finding. Eventually, the brutal life of the camp causes Stanley's friend, Zero, to run off into the desert. Stanley escapes from the camp and pursues his friend to save him from a certain death from exposure. Together they survive the hostile desert environment. Through Stanley's efforts the evil warden is brought to justice and Stanley is freed to be with his family. One of the charms of this story is in the quirky characters and rather odd plot twists that involve characters in the present and the past. The novel appeals to the reader on many levels. There is mystery, suspense, humor, flashbacks, and much more. The themes of friendship, loyalty, and perseverance are woven throughout the story. The reading level is low enough to make this book appealing to students of many grade and achievement levels. The interest level spans a wide range of age groups. This is a wonderful reading adventure for junior high and high school students and a "must have" for any library collection.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: To chronicle a broken world, must you be a broken person?
Review: This novel turns thematically on the words of a lullaby that a family passes down through four generations. Right at the start of that descent, somebody twists the words around from the way they were suppposed to be, and the meaning gets twisted right around, too. The lullaby originally extolled what you might call natural virtue: "fly high, my angel, my only." As debased, it extolled a sheepishly grinning fatalism: "'if only, if only,' while the wolves howl outside the door" (in my slight paraphrase). That contortion provides all the thematic emotional force the book contains. The original, undebased version of the lullaby appears on the last page of the book. You close the book with the contrast of the two versions ringing in your ears. The rest of the book vaguely foreshadows that eventual revelatory contrast by constantly pointing out people's fatalism and the evil it gives rise to: by first conniving at evil, then rationalizing evil, and eventually masterminding evil. The problem is that the two literary devices have no unifying principle: they coexist without cooperating. The poetic tension of the pair of lullabies hangs over the spectacle of the narrative like a great painting hung high on a wall in a gallery full of people who are all ignoring it in their gaucherie and philistinism. Given that my metaphorical painting condemns gaucherie and philistinism, this would not be a total artistic loss. However, unlike the gallery-goers, whom we may condemn for their claiming to be cultured, to be sighted, while they rhapsodize in their blindness, the reader of "Holes" as well as its characters have apparently come upon their crassitude through no fault of their own. I speak now of the life the reader shares with the characters in the course of the narrative. They and we have apparently been so beaten down by life so that their and our fatalism is as ordinary as spit. The notion that our fatalism is somehow our own work hangs over us uncomprehendingly, and we of it. That duality of theme, or discordancy between narrative and theme, betokens, I fear, another discordancy in the book: children read for action, adults read for meaning. This leads to a third: the author inhabits a world of meaning, the reader inhabits a world of literary gimmicks. Thence, the ultimate: the aristocrat acts upon the truth, the proletariat is acted upon by the truth. If literature is worth anything, is anything, it is the desire of people to see their lives and themselves in the round, as they go, so that they may judge the lives they live even while they live them. Literature is never anything more than a fable told by a cranky old person to children who may not want to hear. If the old person is unwilling to bend down and join in the narrative course of the children, as it were, in order to weave the fable's theme into the theme of the children's lives, the fable has no life in it. One published review called the book a shaggy dog story. I think perhaps that that technique only works with jokes. This book leaves me resentful that the author did not put himself down into the words, but only stuck himself on at the end, like a celebrity's cameo public service announcement stuck on to the end of a TV movie that deals with a social ill. I don't doubt that Mr. Sachar did his best. That's the way fatalism works. Here's my "word from our sponsor": the opposite of fatalism is not determination and exuberance,which Mr. Sachar seems to be full of. It is conscience, which I define as that sensibility for the tiniest loose end, the naryest hard pea under twenty nine feather mattresses, the response to which loose end and hard pea finally turns a bewildered old man into the tragic hero of Shakespeare's King Lear. In the case of "Holes", the author almost admits that he and his hero, Stanley Yelnats, may leave the book as bewildered as they began it . . . "if only, if only, the moon speaks no reply; reflecting the sun and all that's gone by. Be strong my weary wolf, turn around boldly. Fly high, my baby bird, my angel, my only." It is not enough to be a good wolf, and a good baby bird. One must be a good person, and that involves, what do they call it, a morbid sensitivity to nuance of expression and quality of theme.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A little strange.....
Review: This novel was truly a little strange, but that is why I kept reading it. It was mysterious, and I had to find out what happened.


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