Is there a Purpose in Digging Holes?

This novel will be tested in the current English Literature paper in SPM in 2010 and 2011.

Written by Louis Sachar, it is an interesting book on the goings-on in a boy's detention camp called Camp Green Lake. This book is easy reading. It is exciting and is a page turner. Meet the characters such as Stanley Yelnats,Zero,X-ray and Mr Sir, The Warden and rattlesnakes and the much dreaded deadly desert lizards with the orange spots.

Though it is about a boy growing up in harsh conditions and about buried treasure,this book is at once profound and full of issues from inter-racial liaisons to onions, inventions to a pair of smelly shoes.

Our story begins with an exposition of Stanley Yelnats, the protagonist on a bus as he surveys the desert wasteland which will become home for him until his period of detention is over. He felt strange when there was no lake, no green except for two trees near the cabin and a multitude of holes everywhere in the desert.

The actual fun starts when he finds an old lipstick shell belonging to a female robber called Kissing Kate Bigelow. From then on it is rising action until the climactic find of God's Thumb,the treasure chest and the appearance of the desert lizards. The falling action starts with the arrival of the Attorney General and the patent lawyer. The resolution sees the release of both Stanley and Zero and the eventual closure of the detention camp.

Great book. Every one should read it.