Sam & Dave Dig a Hole by Mac Barnett

Hey, Story Seekers!

Sam and Dave have a plan.

Dig a hole.

Keep digging until they find something spectacular.

Simple enough.

Except there are enormous treasures buried all around them.

We can see them.

The dog seems to know something's down there.

Sam and Dave?

Clueless.

We're exploring Sam & Dave Dig a Hole, written by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Jon Klassen.

Readit has been staring at the first diamond for several minutes now.

"They're going the wrong way."

I know.

"THE WRONG WAY."

You're going to find this book difficult.

Book Breakdown

The cover is already playing the game.

You can see above ground and below ground at the same time. The boys are down in the dirt with their shovels. Up top there's a cat, and an apple tree.

Remember the apple tree. It matters later.

Sam and Dave dig because they're looking for something spectacular. That's the whole mission statement. Their dog comes along.

They dig straight down.

Nothing.

So they decide to change direction. Perfectly reasonable.

Except the pictures show us what Sam and Dave can't see.

They were close.

Painfully close.

There's a diamond just off to one side of their hole, and Klassen places it so that the boys turn away from it at the exact moment they'd have hit it. Then they do it again. And again. And the gems get bigger every time they miss one, until they pass directly underneath a diamond roughly the size of a car.

Eventually they're worn out. They drink their chocolate milk, eat their animal cookies, and fall asleep at the bottom of the hole.

The dog doesn't sleep.

The dog has spotted something and starts digging for it himself.

Then the ground gives way, and down they all go.

They land somewhere that looks like home.

Looks like it.

The apple tree is now a pear tree. The flowerpot on the porch has changed color. Small things, placed quietly, for anybody who was paying attention.

Sam and Dave notice none of it. They head inside for more chocolate milk and animal cookies.

Where are they?

The book does not tell you.

That's the end. That's on purpose.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile 450L · Fountas & Pinnell L · ATOS 1.9 · 275 words · AR Quiz 169653 · 0.5 points. Candlewick Press, October 14, 2014. Forty pages, ages 4 to 8.

Two hundred and seventy-five words. That's the whole book. Klassen is carrying most of the story, which is exactly why it took a 2015 Caldecott Honor. It also won the 2015 E.B. White Read Aloud Award in the picture book category and was a Goodreads Choice Award nominee.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

This book is mean.

I mean that with enormous affection.

Barnett knows precisely what he's doing to you. Sam and Dave announce they'll keep digging until they find something spectacular.

Fine.

Then Klassen shows you something spectacular.

Enormous diamond. They're almost on it. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.

They turn.

Oh, come on.

But here's the part I'd point any parent or teacher toward.

The words don't tell that joke.

Read Barnett's text alone and you have two boys digging around and finding nothing. Nobody misses anything, because in the words there's nothing to miss.

Klassen is the one who tells you they're blowing it.

That's the cleanest example I know of an illustrator working as a storyteller rather than a decorator. Take the pictures away and you don't get a plainer version of this book. You get a completely different one, and a much worse one.

What it does for the reader is promote them. You know more than the characters do. Kids love that, and they do not sit quietly with it.

They help.

Loudly.

Let them. When that shovel gets close, slow down. Give the room time to see it and time to start shouting. Then turn the page and let them watch the boys go the other way.

The noise you get is the whole point of reading this one out loud.

Now, the dog.

Most people finish this book saying the dog was the smart one. He's the only one who notices the diamonds, he points at them, nobody listens.

But look at what the dog actually digs for at the end.

It isn't a diamond.

It's a bone.

The dog was never hunting treasure. He had his own idea of something spectacular the entire time, and when he finally decided to dig for it himself, he got it. He's the only character in the book who ends up with what he came for.

Sam and Dave wanted diamonds and went home with none.

The dog wanted a bone.

The dog ate.

When the American Library Association gave Klassen the Caldecott Honor, their citation said readers would be "challenged to ponder the meaning of 'spectacular.'" I think that's exactly right, and I think the dog is the argument. Spectacular depends entirely on who's doing the wanting.

Then there's the ending, and I'm glad they refuse to explain it.

Something happened. The evidence is lying right there on the page. A pear tree where an apple tree used to be.

The book hands you that and stops.

Now your kid has to think.

Good.

Readit's Review

NO.

NO NO NO.

GO BACK.

THE DIAMOND IS RIGHT THERE.

Jimmy, why can't they see it?

"They're underground."

WE can see it.

"We're the readers."

Then give me a shovel.

Also I was watching the dog the whole time.

The dog knew.

And then at the end the dog didn't even want the diamonds. He wanted a BONE.

Honestly? Respect.

He knew what he liked and he went and got it while those two were asleep in a hole.

But that's not their house at the end.

It LOOKS like their house.

But it's wrong.

The tree is wrong.

So where are they?

Jimmy?

Jimmy.

You cannot just end a book there.

What Others Think

Goodreads has it at 4.17 out of 5 from 10,703 ratings and 1,667 reviews, with 78 percent at four or five stars.

Reviewer karen captures the experience better than I can: readers "can't quite squash that impulse to yell at the characters, IT'S RIGHT THERE OH MY GOODNESS DON'T STOP NOW," building to "the final explosive frustration of wanting just ONE MORE PAGE to settle the ending's ambiguity."

She also offers this, which tells you how hard the book works on adults: "depending on your own psychological makeup, this is either a cute and funny children's book, or the most insidious and emotionally scarring book intended for children since The Velveteen Rabbit."

Her closing advice is two lines: "always listen to the dog. and also maybe don't fall asleep in holes."

The ending is where readers really go to work. One reviewer, Travis, was moved to write out six separate theories about what happens, ranked from least to most likely. They include the boys landing in a parallel world, waking on the other side of the planet, the whole thing being a dream, and a Truman Show scenario in which the sky is a dome and the cat is an actor.

Six theories. For a 275-word picture book.

He also called it "one of the best open-ended picture book conclusions in recent memory," and after seeing the theories I'm inclined to agree.

But my favorite piece of evidence for how sneaky Klassen is being comes from a reader who went in already knowing about the pear tree. Somebody had told them. They finished the book and complained that there was no apple tree at the beginning, so the pear was meaningless.

Then they flipped back to check.

The apple tree was right there on page one.

They had been told exactly what to look for and still missed it, which is the most thorough way anybody has ever proved this book's point.

The honest warning: that ending loses some readers, and a kid who races the final pages will miss the trick entirely. This book pays out for looking. If your kid blows through it and shrugs, go back with them and compare the first page to the last.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

This isn't setup-and-punchline funny.

It's oh come on funny.

You see the diamond. Sam and Dave don't. They're nearly on top of it. They change direction.

Again.

The comedy comes from knowing more than the characters and being completely powerless to help, and Klassen keeps twisting it by making each missed treasure bigger than the last.

That's wonderfully cruel construction.

Then the ending delivers one final wait, what.

Four instead of five because laughs aren't the only engine here. Curiosity, frustration, visual hunting and that unresolved ending are all doing as much work as the jokes. This book wants to be studied as much as it wants to be laughed at, and that's a slightly different animal.

Big-Time Belly Laughs.

With shouting.

Final Explorer Verdict

Ages 4 to 8, and I'd hand it first to the kid who likes spotting things before the characters do.

This is a book for lookers. Kids who study pictures. Kids who yell warnings at the page. Kids who go back to the beginning after the last page because suddenly they don't trust anything they saw the first time.

It's also the best short argument I know for why picture books aren't just stories with pictures stuck on.

Mac Barnett gives you Sam and Dave's experience.

Jon Klassen gives you yours.

Those two things are not the same, and the entire book lives in the gap between them. Two hundred and seventy-five words and a Caldecott Honor.

Read it once for the digging.

Read it again for the dog.

Then put the first page next to the last page and see who notices.

Warning: the ending genuinely does not resolve, and some kids will be annoyed by that. Some adults too. If your child needs everything tied off, this one will itch. If your child likes an argument, you may not get them to stop talking about it.

There's a connection to my own shelf here. My book Fort Night is about a kid named Hugo trying to build the ultimate blanket fort, and it keeps collapsing on him. Sam and Dave are digging rather than building, but both books run on the same thing kids already understand: you have a plan, the plan is wrong, and what you find is not the thing you set out for.

Readit?

"I solved the ending."

Already?

"Yes."

Well?

"They're somewhere else."

That's your solution?

"Definitely."

Where?

"I haven't solved that part."

Keep digging, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit