Holes
With Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, Patricia Arquette, Tim Blake Nelson, Shia LaBeouf, Khleo Thomas, Dule Hill, Henry Winkler, and Eartha Kitt.
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I asked my sister, who has a graduate degree in children’s literature, what she made of the current trend of kid lit being consumed by adults, and the best explanation she could offer was “the erosion of childhood as a protected sphere in our culture, kids no longer allowed to be kids, adults no longer willing to be adults,” blah de blah.
For a kids’ tale, it has a surprisingly sophisticated narrative structure, with three interwoven story lines that unfold over the course of more than a century. One of these involves an interracial romance that ends in a lynching, but the darkest of the three subplots–the one that attracts kids like sugar draws flies–is set at Camp Green Lake, a boot camp in sun-baked west Texas where juvenile inmates are marched out daily onto a dry lake bed and each forced to dig a hole five feet square and five feet deep. The desert terrain there is thick with scorpions, rattlesnakes, and awful yellow-spotted lizards whose bite brings slow, agonizing, certain death. Into this hellish environment comes Stanley Yelnats, a poor boy wrongly convicted of stealing a pair of sneakers. “We’ve got the only water for a hundred miles,” the cold-hearted gang boss Mr. Sir announces to Stanley and the other newcomers. “You want to run away? You’ll be buzzard food in three days.”
