Brett Mackelfresh

Brett Mackelfresh

1)Story-Holes (1998)

2)Author- Louis Sachar (1954-current)

3)Protagonist- Stanley Yelnats, a young boy who lives in a lower middle class family and gets wrongly convicted of a crime.

4)Antagonist- His curse, caused by his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealin'-great-great-grandfather.

5)Conflict- He has to dig holes every day, then he has to save his new found friend, Zero.

6)Minor characters- Zero-Thequietkid that everyone thinks is stupid, but turns out to be much more. X-ray-The leader of Stanley's cabin according to "the group" that Stanley lives with. Mr. Pendanski-The leader of cabin D(Stanley's cabin). Warden Walker-The owner of the land. Mr. Sir-Camp counselor.

7)Setting- A dried up lake, that has hundreds of holes dug by the campers over the years.

8)Narrator/Point of View- Third person limited

9)Summary-Stanley Yelnats is convicted of the crime of stealing a baseball players shoes, which he did not do. The judge gives him the choice of "camp" Green lake, and time in prison. Stanley, thinking that he is going to a camp for fun, is very suprised when he finds out that the camp is not exactly centered around fun. When Stanley gets to the camp, he talks to the camp counciler, Mr. Sir. Mr. Sir is not very nice, and he tells Stanley that he is going to be digging holes for his entire stay at the camp. He explains the details to him, and the fact that the hole has to be as long, wide, and tall as the shovel, 5 feet. As Stanley goes about his time digging the holes, he realizes that the boys in the camp,X-ray,Zig-Zag, Zero, and Armpit actually like him, which was the first place he ever felt welcome. Later in the story, after Stanley begins to get over the pain of holding the shovel every day, and digging the holes, he finds a fossil. Mr. Sir told Stanley when he got there that if he found anything to report it to him. That is what Stanley did, and they told him to keep digging. He later finds another thing that he thinks is "interesting" and brings it to X-ray because he conviced Stanley to give him anything if he finds it. Because of this, X-ray gets the day off. Stanley begins to think that the counselor is actually looking for something. Stanley remembers a story about that has been in his family about Elya Yelnats, Stanley's great great grandfather. The story was about Elya trying to win over a girl, so he goes to ask his best friend/fortune teller what to do. She tells him to let the pig drink from a stream on the mountain. He does that, and the pig he brings to the girls father is exactly the same weight, so the girls father lets the girls decide who she wants to be with, she says she doesn't care. The catch was that he had to bring the pig up the mountain even on the last day before he went to weigh it, which would have made his pig heavier. When he realizes that even if the pig he had was bigger the girl would have never loved him. So he told the girl's dad to keep the pig, he doesn't care about her anymore. He then thinks that Madame Zeroni was right, and that he was actually suppose to carry her up the hill after he won over the girl. He did not listen to her, so she cursed him and all of his chidren and their children. Stanley now believes that that is why he has such bad luck in his life, and why he got wrongly convicted of the crime. He also remembers another story later about the lake before it dried up. It was a beautiful place, and there was happy life everywhere. He heard that there was a teacher, Miss Kate, who loved a black man named Sam. Her and Sam spent as much time as possible together. Kate loved making spiced peaches and Sam loved growing onions on the other side of the river. He would paddle over to her every day. She later didn't get to see sam, because she didn't have an excuse for him to come over. Sam died in his boat, and Kate became a cowgirl that was a cold-blooded killer and a theif. She would kiss all of her dead victims, and that is why she got the name, Kissin' Kate Barlow. Stanley Starts to think that the cylindrical object he found was from Kissin' Kate Barlow, because he saw a KK on the bottom, which he thinks stood for Kissin' Kate. Stanley got Mr. Sir in trouble because he thought that the object he found was nothing, so the camp counciler slapped him accross the face with poisonous nail polish. His face was swelling up, and he got angry at Stanley, so he stopped giving him water. One day zero decided he wanted to learn to read, so he and Stanley made a deal that in Zero would dig in Stanley's hole for 30 minutes, then Stanley would help Zero learn to read. After Zero was getting the jist of how to read, he couldn't take digging the holes every day, so he hit Mr. Sir accross the face with his shovel, tried to drive the truck away, and crashed it into a hole. He jumped out and started to run. All he had was a canteen full of water and his shovel. After a few days, Stanley went after him. He walked for hours and hours toward what he thought was "God's thumb", which