Holes (Novel)

I was very surprised how good the book was. It's clearly written for kids but addresses mature things like racism expertly.

I'm not going to lie. Many of the bits of the mystery I guessed correctly ahead of time. But I didn't guess ALL of it. And me being right about a couple of things just made the surprises more credible. A good mystery should not be entirely unpredictable. It needs to be able to hang together properly. And this did.

I like how the bits in the past with Stanley's ancestors and Kate Barlow had to do with his current woes, and what was going on a Camp Green Lake. It all boils down to a big coincidence, which is fine, because after what Stanley and Zero went through, they sort of earned a miracle of a happy ending. I wouldn't want to take it away from them even if Stanley's name being on that briefcase is actually a billion to one shot.

The kids at the camp strike me as shockingly broken people. It's very interesting to thrust Stanley in the middle of them, but their nickname insistence thing is outright weird.

The Warden is shockingly scary villain just based on what she did to Mr. Sir with the poison nail-polish. The Narrator of the story doesn't actually tell us if she got her just desserts and went to prison (preferring us to fill in the "Holes" of the story ourselves) but I think she must have. At least I hope so. She was a piece of work.

I had expected a bit of a more comical story going in and I was impressed at how much things actually emotionally resonated. They printed an excerpt of Stanley's Yelnats' Survival Guide To Camp Green Lake and that was pretty much as jokey as I expected this to be. But I felt this book, particularly the second half, was sincere rather than satirical. I enjoyed it a lot. ****1/2.