★★★★★ Dragons can be killed

Holes

Louis Sachar

Let me start be explaining my review title. There are no literal dragons in Holes. The title comes from this quote

The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.
-- G.K. Chesterton

I read Holes in 2000. At the time I was a professor, and one of my students, who had a young family, mentioned that he had been reading Holes to his young son, and that his son was upset by the violence.

Well, I have always made a habit of reading Newbery Medal winners, but being at the time extraordinarily busy, I had fallen behind. This comment induced me to get a copy and read it.

It is an extraordinarily good book. You probably know already that the Newbery Medal was just the first of the many honors it has been awarded. It was "was ranked number 6 among all-time children's novels by School Library Journal in 2012." (The quote is from Wikipedia.) And it deserves these honors. It is a vivid high-stakes fantasy unlike any I had ever read. The main action takes place in a fictional 20th century Texas community, but also in historical locales.

As I already said -- there are no literal dragons. The characters are ordinary people, and the central character, Stanley Yelnats, is an ordinary boy, unjustly convicted of a theft he didn't commit and sent to a "Juvenile Correctional Facility" -- this is one of the names we give to prisons for children in the USA.

I think that, above all, what makes Holes so compelling is the thing that my former student mentioned -- it is upsetting. Not only because of violence -- although there is that, it is the injustice that burns. Despite the fantasy elements, Holes feels real. It *IS* real -- as Chesterton says, "there are dragons". There are prisons for children -- those too are real, and more frightening than any fairy tale dragon.

It is a mistake to think that children's books are or should be gentle. Every child is different from every other, of course, but to think of children as weak is a mistake. Historically children's stories have been full of violence. Look at the original versions of The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales for an example, or Roald Dahl, or A Little Princess, or Charlotte's Web, ... The list could be extended indefinitely.

Holes belongs in that distinguished company of children's books that make you care.

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