Language

Simple vocabulary

The novel Holes by Louis Sachar is written mainly using simple, everyday language. The style is mainly youth-friendly and easy-to-read.

Since Holes is largely told from the point of view of the teenage main character Stanley Yelnats, the vocabulary is mostly limited to everyday terms. Even those chapters that are not rendered from Stanley's personal point of view (see the "Narrator and point of view" section for more on this) contain a simple, easy to understand language.

For example, when the scientific characteristics of yellow-spotted lizards are described in Chapter 8, the writer refrains from using complex terms. Their description gets by with simple and everyday terms: 

Actually, it is kind of odd that scientists named the lizard after its yellow spots. Each lizard has e...