Holes

Residents of the camp have fistfights and use shovels as weapons. Guards carry guns. In a flashback, a woman is sexually assaulted by the sheriff, and a racist mob murders a Black man for kissing a White woman. A woman later shoots the sheriff.

Sam and Katherine kiss.

In a flashback, the sheriff of Green Lake sits at his desk drinking whiskey. He tells Katherine, "I always get drunk before a hanging."

Parents need to know that Louis Sachar's Holes is a moving, action-packed, and sometimes violent mystery that won the Newbery Medal. It's about a boy named Stanley, who's falsely accused of a crime and sent to a juvenile detention center in the middle of a desert in Texas. The story will excite young readers' sense of justice, as Stanley is treated most unfairly. In the flashback passages, Katherine, a White woman, loves Sam, a Black man, and they're victims of racist violence. There's threatened as well as real violence in the present-day parts of the book, including fistfights, drawn guns, attacks with shovels, and danger of poisoning. This is a more intense book than many novels for this age group, as some adults in the book treat youngsters as slaves. However, there are some funny moments, and the mysterious ways that past and present connect in the book are engaging at just the right grade level. The book was adapted for a 2003 movie, and there's a good audiobook version read by Kerry Beyer.