Holes
Louis Sachar (1998)
“A boy cursed by fate digs holes in the Texas desert — and slowly unearths 150 years of injustice, racism, and the strange power of friendship to break a curse.”
Similar Books
Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Another American novel in which a child narrator witnesses racial injustice and the failure of the legal system to protect Black citizens — written for adults but assigned at the same grade level
The Giver
Lois Lowry
A dystopian institution uses children as instruments of a system's needs while claiming it's for their benefit — the same fundamental premise as Camp Green Lake
Wonder
R.J. Palacio
A middle-grade novel that takes seriously the question of what it costs to be the person the institution has decided is a problem
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
Mildred D. Taylor
Set in the same historical era as the Kate Barlow sections — a Black family in the rural South navigating racial violence with the same combination of dignity and strategic survival
The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros
A novel in short chapters about intergenerational poverty, race, and the limitations imposed by a world that has decided who you are before you speak
Monster
Walter Dean Myers
Another novel about a young person of color processed by a justice system that has already decided the verdict — the system's cruelty made visible through the child's experience of it