Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from.
Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories-but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar ( Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).ĭriven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. The climax involving evil brigands is a bit forced, but everything else is an unalloyed joy. There’s a lot about girls in groups, both kind and cutting a sweet boy the warmth of friends, fathers and sisters and the possibility of being chosen by a prince one barely knows. Miri seeks other learning as well, including the mindspeech that ties her to her people, and seems to work through the linder stone itself. Olana, their teacher, is pinched and cruel, but Miri and the others take to their studies, for it opens the world beyond the linder quarries to them. However, she’s rounded up, with the other handful of girls ages 12 to 17, to be taught and trained when it’s foreseen that the prince’s bride will come from their own Mount Eskel.
Miri is very small her father has never let her work in the linder stone quarries where her village makes its living and she fears that it’s because she lacks something. There are many pleasures to this satisfying tale: a precise lyricism to the language (“The world was as dark as eyes closed” or “Miri’s laugh is a tune you love to whistle”) and a rhythm to the story that takes its tropes from many places, but its heart from ours.
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