Holes

Holes, by Louis Sachar, follows Stanley Yelnats, a boy whose family blames its long run of bad luck on a curse placed on his great-great-grandfather. When Stanley is wrongly accused of stealing a pair of famous sneakers, he is sent to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention camp in the Texas desert where the lake dried up long ago. Every day the boys at the camp must dig a large hole, five feet across and five feet down, supposedly to build character, but Stanley soon suspects that the warden is searching for something buried in the old lake bed. Stories set more than a century earlier, about an outlaw, a lost fortune and the town that once stood by the water, gradually connect to Stanley's own. Funny, inventive and tightly plotted, the novel is published for readers ten to fourteen and is a long-standing favorite in middle school classrooms.