Compulsory Readings II
Louis Sachar
Louis Sachar is the bestselling author of the award-winning novel Holes, as well as Stanley Yelnats’ Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake, There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom, Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes, and the Marvin Redpost series, among many other books.
He was born March 20, 1954, in East Meadow, New York. His father worked on the 78th floor of the Empire State Building. When he was nine, his family moved to Tustin, California.
He attended the University of California, at Berkeley. During his last year there, he helped out at an elementary school–Hillside School, an experience that inspired his first book, Sideways Stories from Wayside School.
He attended Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and graduated in 1980. He worked part-time as a lawyer for eight years as he continued to write children's books. He lives in Austin, Texas with his family.
Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys’ detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes.
It doesn’t take long for Stanley to realize there’s more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake. The boys are digging holes because the warden is looking for something. But what could be buried under a dried-up lake? Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment—and redemption.