Holes- Analysis

It is my great pleasure and honour to announce that I’ve finished the book!

As I’ve no intention of boring you to death, I’ll skip the bit about the book being a children’s novel J and proceed with my analysis.

The University of Texas at Austin, College of Fine Arts-Theatre production

The plot is well thought out and nicely structured. The drastic switch of the stories (Stanley’s-his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather’s &Kate Barlow’s), is quite a common technique to grab the readers’ attention, which seems to work well in this case. Also there seems to be a lot of repetition going on throughout the whole story but I’m not sure if that’s considered to be a flaw or a strength in the author’s writing style. Take the verbal and factual repetition of the word “Girl Scouts” for example, for me at least, the over-usage of this word killed the carefully injected irony at the end of the story. (Mr. Sir is constantly reminding the boys that they aren’t at a Girl Scout Camp and in the end Camp Green Lake becomes a Girl Scout Camp.)

The fact that the separately told stories of Stanley, his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and Kate Barlow turn out to be all closely connected with each other, leads to a satisfactory ending. However, apart from being satisfactory, these connections also prove to be rather predictable and I daresay primitive, as they don’t come as much of a surprise to the reader. (The curse wears off when Stanley carries Zero up the mountain.) Thus, for the curious and enquiring mind, it’ll simply fail to suffice.

w:248

And with these last words, I bid my farewell to you all. 

:)