Hole in My Life

Title: Hole in my Life
Author: Jack Gantos

Book Report by: Jessica Jia

Jack Gantos is a young man wandering through life desperately wishing to have something worth remembering. An avid reader, he dreams of adventure and living life on the edge. He makes a stupid decision, he ends up in jail. It’s definitely not what he envisioned of his future.

I think it was the cover and the title that intrigued me the most. I misread the title as, “A Hole in my Life”. I was very curious to see what the “hole” was. I was so misled by my mistake. The title that I came up with had a deeper meaning and foreshadowing to me than the actual title. I thought “A Hole in my Life” would be about a part of the writer’s life that was suspenseful/funny/interesting to read. In that perspective, I was let down greatly because "Hole in my Life" turned out to be a slow moving account of Jack Gantos’s mistakes as a young man. Most of it is talking about how pitiful and pathetic the events were that lead him to jail, and what happens to him while he is there. The book does however strike on a more introspective level. While I was looking for a fast paced and witty read, the book turned out to be a slow grilling of Jack’s thoughts and dreams as a developing writer.

The first third of the book is completely void of suspense. A bare outline of an interesting story starts to emerge about one third through the book - when Jack sets out on an illegal drug trafficking journey across the Atlantic to New York. Nothing much happens except that Jack is still wishing for adventure. It lands him in jail. Now, I thought, things should start to be really interesting. But even then, Jack’s time in prison is extremely rare and lucky - and boring to read. A one in a million shot, he was able to obtain a single occupant cell and stay out of the main criminal population. Where was the action that I was looking for? He didn’t have to dodge much or come up with cunning ways to survive. His main problem was that he could not mentally handle being there.

Nevertheless, in jail, he develops his focus as a writer; and in the end the whole experience helps him find out who he truly is inside and gives him unusual clairvoyance to his true self.