Ok so that’s the main story but basically this is one of the best parts. I’ll tell the story chronologically:
150 years ago, in a Texas town called Green Lake, there lived a teacher named Kate Barlow. She was in love with the only Black man in town, Sam, who was a handyman and sold onions from a secret water source on top of a mountain that looks like a thumb. They couldn’t admit their love for each other, because everyone else was racist, but every day she’d come up with a reason for him to stick around the schoolhouse after the kids left. She’d say “oh the roof is leaking” or “this picture is crooked, can you rehang it” and he’d say, “I can fix that”. Think along the lines of “as you wish” from the Princess Bride but they aren’t mean to each other.
Finally, one day, instead of Kate paying Sam with peach preserves, they kiss, and the creep who has a crush on Kate sees it, kills Sam and his donkey, and burns down the schoolhouse, ruining the town’s educational oppurtunities. Kate then leaves town, heartbroken. She comes back and murders the creep and the friends who helped with the lynching, giving them all a kiss after their dead. She becomes the infamous outlaw, Kissin’ Kate Barlow, who robs men and only kisses them once they’re dead.
THATS THE END OF THE RELEVENT INFO ABOUT HOLES - if you want to know more, keep reading. Lots of spoilers.
Cut to a village in Latvia - a young, sad, poor man named Elya Yelnats desperately wants to marry the dumb blonde in the village. She is set to marry the old town butcher, in exchange for her dad getting a fat pig. Elya goes to the local Roma woman, named Madame Zeroni, to get magic help on raising a super fat pig, to beat the butchers pig, and win the blonde in marriage. He only has a year to do it.
She teaches him to carry a piglet up a special mountain, have the piglet (she just gave him the runt of the litter) drink from a special stream, and he has to sing to the piglet, to make it grow fat and strong. In exchange for the pig and the advice, Elya has to carry the ancient Madame Zeroni up the mountain and do the ritual with her, so she can grow young and strong again. She tells him it would probably just be a better rides to go to American and get a fortune, but he thinks he’s in love with the blonde. So they shake on it. Madame Zeroni promises to curse him if he doesn’t follow through on his end of the deal.
Meanwhile, Elya grows strong, and more confident in himself. However, on the day he and the butcher are supposed to weigh their pigs, the pigs are the exact same weight. So they ask the dumb blonde who she wants to marry, and despite Elya obviously being the better, nicer choice, she acts indecisively. Disgusted, he totally forgets his promise and leaves town to go to America. Madame Zeroni then sets a curse bad luck on him and his line.
Elya starts a family, and he has a lot of bad luck. However, his son, *Stanley, has some good luck for awhile and has a whole trunk of treasure. Unfortunately, while traveling through Texas, Kissin’ Kate Barlow robs him. Stanley the First is the only man she ever left alive, because he didn’t deserve to die. He stumbles across Sam the onion-farmer’s old water source and survives.
A decade or so after that, Kissin’ Kate Barlow comes back to Green Lake, to find that the lake had dried up because now rain had fallen since that terrible night, the extremely venomous yellow-spotted lizards had started swarming the area, and her former students were all miserable people who wanted to take her money, blaming their misfortune on Kate and Sam. She tells them that she buried her treasure somewhere in the dried up Lake bed, and that they could dig for a hundred years and never find it. She dies laughing.
Sometime between the 1800s and the late 1990s/early 2000s, the Zeroni family migrated to America and also fall upon hard times.
Cut to ‘modern’ day. Stanley IV loves with his family in a small apartment with his family. His Dad, who is obsessed with inventing a cure to stinky feet, makes the whole place smell like old sneakers. One day, while Stanley is walking home from school when a pair of stolen shoes that were meant to be sold for charity (a celebrity athlete wore them) hit him on the head. He is arrested for stealing the shoes, and is sent to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention facility. There, he and a bunch of other boys have to dig a 6x6 foot (6feet = 2 meters) hole every day, and are supposed to tell ‘the Warden’ if they find anything interesting. There are a bunch of boys with interesting nicknames - one named Armpit actually got a spin-off book which was interesting - but the most interesting kid is a young boy named Zero.
Zero can dig twice as fast as the other kids, and was only arrested because he’s a homeless orphan. Stanley offers to help him learn how to read in exchange for help with digging his hole. The other kids are like “hey that’s kind of racist, a white boy having a Black kid dig his hole” but Zero learns to read really quickly, and the issue is kind of brushed over. Finally, one day, Stanley uncovers an old lipstick tube that was Kate’s, and the Warden (who was the granddaughter of the students who watched Kate die) and her really weird lackeys get super excited and they all excavate the hell out of the area where the lipstick tube was supposedly found.
(Stanley lied about which hole it was from because when they find something ‘interesting’ [the warden never tells the kids what they’re looking for] they get extra long showers and the rest of the day off. So he figured if he had more to ‘discover’ later, he could get more breaks later)
Eventually, they give up on the false area, and the warden and her cronies go back to bullying the kids. Zero, who was nicknamed that because one of the asshole adults (Pendanski) found out he didn’t know how to read and didn’t like talking much decided that he had ‘zero thoughts in his head’, gets bullied by Pendanski over still learning how to read, and hits Pendanski on the head with a shovel and runs off into the desert with no water.
Immediately, Zero gets replaced by another kid (who likes to Hotwire cars) immediately, and Stanley gets suspicious. He finds out that they’re just going to let Zero die out there alone (the official policy is that you can leave Camp Green Lake any time you want, but it’s the only source of water for a hundred miles, so it’s effectively fenced in) and Stanley gets angry. So he learns how to Hotwire and tries to steal the water truck to go and find Zero and bring him water. He almost immediately drives it into a hole. But still, Stanley runs after Zero.
He finds Zero, halfway up the thumb-shaped mountain, really sick from a fever and drinking old peach preserves, which smell super nice. They realize it isn’t sustainable, Stanley notices that water is flowing from the top of the mountain. They decide to go up there to find more water. He carries Zero up the mountain to find Sam’s old water source and onion farm. Stanley happens to be singing the old Zeroni song at the time. They survive and start talking about themselves and what they’d do with the Yelnats’ treasure if they found it in the lake bed. They of course agree to split it 50/50.
Stanley tells the story of how he got sent to the Camp. Zero then says that he lost his mom a couple years ago and That he’s been living on the streets since. Turns out he was the one who stole the shoes, and tossed them away once he realized they didn’t fit his feet. Since he couldn’t read, he didn’t know that they were being sold for charity when he sold them. Zero also reveals that his full name is Hector **Zeroni. I will now call him Hector.
Full of onions, peaches and water, they walk down in the middle of the night to go and find the treasure. The venomous yellow-spotted lizards, who live in the holes, don’t care about Stanley and Hector because they ate the special onions. Unfortunately, they are discovered by the adults just as they uncover the treasure chest.
They stay there all night, covered in lizards, while the adults kind of point a gun at them and kind of hope they get bitten by the lizards.
But finally, in the morning, the lawyer for Stanley’s case pulls up and says that he was actually found innocent, and that his father has discovered the cure for stinky feet, which is coincidentally a mixture made from peach preserves. She realized how terrible the camp is, and how cruelly the kids are treated, and tries to take Stanley away while leaving Hector and the treasure in the hands of the evil warden and her cronies (who turn out to be escaped criminals, ironically.). However, he and Hector prove that the treasure belongs to Stanley because the ownership papers are in his name (because his great grandfather had the same name) and also makes sure that Hector gets rescued from being murdered.
Since a Yelnats carried a Zeroni up the mountain, healed him and sang the special song, the curse is broken. And since the treasure was returned to the right people and justice was kind of served, the curse that Kissin’ Kate Barlow put on Green Lake is lifted too. It finally rains on the old lake.
All the kids get lighter sentences and/or are set free, Hector and Stanley have a lot of money, and Bector finds his Mom. The adults get arrested. The End
*the joke is that Stanley is Yelnats backwards, so all the Yelnats after Elya are named Stanley. The main character of the book and movie is Stanley IV.
**Zero is Black and Roma, but you wouldn’t know about the Roma part without knowing his backstory.
