Holes

Stanley Yelnats's family has always had bad luck since his great-great-grandfather broke a promise to a woman in his Latvian village. Now the bad luck has caught up with Stanley Yelnats IV. Falsely convicted of a crime he did not commit, Stanley is forced to attend Camp Green Lake -- a juvenile detention facility located within a dry lakebed. Every day, the residents of the camp must dig a hole five feet deep and five feet around. Ostensibly the hole digging is to build character, but Stanley figures out pretty soon that they are actually digging to find something, and Stanley and his friend Hector Zeroni, also known as Zero, try to escape Camp Green Lake and solve the mystery of the holes. Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys' detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day, digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes. It doesn't take long for Stanley to realize that Camp Green Lake isn't what it seems. Are the boys digging holes because the warden is looking for something? But what could be buried under a dried-up lake? It's up to Stanley to dig up the truth. As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself.