A book report on the book “Holes” by Louis Sachar

The novel called “Holes” by Louis Sachar mainly takes place at Camp Green Lake, a detention center for boys. Camp Green Lake does not have a lake. It used to be a big lake full of water until it stopped raining there forever. Now it is a dry, flat wasteland for misbehaved boys and the only water comes from the warden. The main character, Stanley Yelnats was sent there innocently, unlike his friends that he met at there. He was walking under a freeway overpass when a pair of shoes owned by a famous baseball player named Clyde Livingston fell on his head. It turned out that the shoes were donated to a homeless shelter to raise money.

The main theme in this novel is Stanley’s family curse that called upon them by his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather. If it were not for his family curse, he would never have gone Camp Green Lake at all. His curse manages to always have him and his family in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whenever something goes bad around his family they need to have somebody to blame, and they blame his great-great-grandfather as a family joke.

The definition for Inference is an activity where you bring outside knowledge to understand the text. Basically, inferencing is when you interpret or gather information or details from the reading, and connect it to your own knowledge and make a leap of judgement about what is happening or what will happen. “‘You are to dig one hole each day […] Each hole must be five feet deep, and five feet across in every direction. Your shovel is your measuring stick.”(Sachar, 13) This quote from the novel Holes, uses inferencing to tell you the requirements of the holes that the boys dig. It says five feet across, five feet deep and that their shovels are their measuring stick. That means the shovel is five feet long and you inference the size of the hole compared to your own shovel that you may have. If you have ever seen a shovel much like the kind used for gardening, then you already know how big the hole is because it is the same size.

I rate this book by Louis Sachar a 3 on a scale of 1-5.The main reason why I would have to rate this book a 3 instead of a 4 is because it is indeed a good book and I know it, but I have already seen the movie before. Therefore, watching the movie before reading the book, I already knew what was going to happen next and the book did not seem to great.