A boy is convicted of a theft he did not commit and sent to a work camp in the Texas desert, where the boys are made to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet across every day. The warden says it builds character. It does not. She is looking for something. Newbery Medal and National Book Award, 1998.
Why it earns read-aloud time
Because of what happens in a child's face somewhere around page two hundred.
Sachar is running three stories at once: a boy digging holes now, an outlaw a hundred and ten years ago, and a man in Latvia before that. For most of the book they look like a novel and two odd side trips. They are not. Every single thing pays off, and when a child works out that the three are one story, you can watch it land.
I have never seen another book for this age do that. Most children's novels are a straight line. This one is a braid, and finishing it teaches a kid that a story can be built, deliberately, by somebody who knew the ending before they wrote the beginning.
Read the last four chapters in one sitting. Do not stop for bedtime. It is worth the late night.
The child it lands with
The older end of this list, and the one who has outgrown being read to but has not said so yet. This is the book that keeps a ten- or eleven-year-old sitting in the room.
Also the kid who thinks they are unlucky. Stanley believes his family is cursed, and the book takes that seriously before it answers it.
One place to stop and talk
Do not ask what happens next. Ask when they figured out the stories were connected.
Every child answers a different chapter, and the conversation about what tipped them off is better than any comprehension question anybody has ever written about this book.
What to know going in
This is the most mature book on the list by a distance, and I would not hand it to most eight-year-olds. Here is exactly why, so you can decide rather than find out.
There is a racial murder in it. In the historical thread, Sam, a Black man, is killed by a white mob for kissing a white woman. Sachar writes it with restraint and without spectacle, and it is not a throwaway: the town's punishment for it is the reason the lake dried up and the reason everything else in the book happens. It is handled with real moral seriousness. It is also a lynching, and your child will need you in the room when it comes.
Beyond that: adults are cruel to children throughout, a boy nearly dies of thirst and exposure, there are guns, and the warden's nail polish is mixed with rattlesnake venom and she uses it on a person. Nobody is rescued by a grown-up. The boys get themselves out.
My own honest read: it fits a mature nine, most tens, and every eleven. Below that, hold it a year. It will still be there.
Where to get it
It is on our shelf at Holes, on the Third-Grade Read-Alouds shelf. It is also on the full list of ten.
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