Holes
A puzzle-box novel that shouldn't have worked, a film adaptation that shouldn't have worked, and somehow both did. Louis Sachar's Holes won the 1998 National Book Award and the 1999 Newbery Medal — then became an honest-to-god good movie.
Holes arrived in 1998 as Louis Sachar's novel, the story of Stanley Yelnats IV, a boy wrongly convicted and sent to Camp Green Lake, a desert facility where the daily ritual is simple and maddening: dig holes. The narrative wove timelines together like a puzzle, each era revealing why this boy dug, why the warden wanted holes dug, and what the dried-up lake had been hiding all along. The novel won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the 1999 Newbery Medal, landing it in classrooms and book fairs where it became a generational touchstone.
The film followed on April 18, 2003, from Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media, directed by Andrew Davis — with Sachar adapting his own novel for the screen, a rarity that worked. Shia LaBeouf made his big-screen breakout as Stanley; the cast included Jon Voight as Mr. Sir, Sigourney Weaver as the Warden, Patricia Arquette as Kissin' Kate Barlow, and Khleo Thomas as Zero. The film made $71.4 million worldwide on a $20 million budget. More than that, kids agreed it got the book right — no small feat. The puzzle held together on screen as it had on the page.
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