Holes

Stanley Yelnats has always had bad luck — a family curse, he's told, handed down ever since his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather crossed an old woman back in the old country. So when Stanley is wrongly convicted of a crime he didn't commit, it feels like just one more turn of fate. He is sent to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention center in the middle of a dried-up Texas lake bed, where the warden makes every boy dig one five-foot hole a day, supposedly to build character.

Stanley soon realizes the digging is not about character at all. Someone is looking for something buried beneath the hard-baked ground, and the answer reaches back through generations — to a frontier schoolteacher, an outlaw, and the curse that has shadowed the Yelnats family for a hundred years. As Stanley befriends a silent boy the others call Zero, the two set out to change their luck for good.

Winner of the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award, Louis Sachar's Holes weaves past and present into a tightly plotted story of fate, friendship, and justice. Funny, suspenseful, and deceptively deep, it has become a modern classic of middle-grade fiction.