I Wish I’d Written: Malorie Blackman

Malorie Blackman on Louis Sachar’s Holes, the most moving, exciting, thrilling book she’s read in a long, long time…

Holes was an unexpected delight. When I started this book, I had no idea what to expect. Two hours later, I was breathless with excitement at having experienced the most moving, exciting, thrilling book I’d read in a long, long time. Stanley Yelnats (a deliberate palindrome!) is sent to a detention camp in Texas for ‘bad boys’ – the euphemistically named Camp Green Lake. The camp is set in a barren desert-like place where ‘if you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy’. A strong narrator voice leads you into the plot like a story-teller weaving magic around a campfire. The different strands in the story appear out of the blue, leaving you wondering why they’re there and where they’re going. But they all weave around each other to produce something as unpredictable as it is wonderful. At the end of the story the past and the present mesh together so perfectly, I had pleasurable tingles running up and down my spine. I will certainly be reading this book again. And again. I loved it.

Louis Sachar’s Holes, reviewed in BfK No.120, is published by Bloomsbury, 0 7475 4648 7, £10.99 hbk (0 7475 4459 X, £5.99 pbk, Oct 2000).

Malorie Blackman’s latest books are Forbidden Game, Puffin, 0 14 130321 2, £3.99 pbk (see review in BfK No.122) and Tell Me No Lies, Macmillan, 0 330 36820 6, £3.99 pbk (see review in BfK No. 119).