8 May, 2001: Holes
There's nothing I like better than a really nasty children's book. Children's books dealing with the fantastic -- to be specific, "books for middle readers," and I set aside the sort of fantasy that Tolkien or Lewis wrote; I want stories about normal boys and girl dealing with fantastic situations -- should, to be really top-notch, be full of dread, absurdity, or dreadful absurdity. Look at the Queen of Hearts in Alice or IT in A Wrinkle in Time. In Edward Eager's Half Magic, a maurading knight is punished by having a flaming plum pudding stuck to the end of his nose. Every word Roald Dahl ever wrote in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was filled with a barely-disguised venom saved up and doled out in poetically suitable ways; every word Daniel Pinkwater has ever written has been filled with a barely-disguised wonder at the sheer breathless comic bafflement that is life. And so with Louis Sachar's Holes.