"Holes," Louis Sachar, Bloomsbury; 2000; 233 pp.

It's hard to say why life is so downright unfair to some children. Take Stanley Yelnats: He gets bullied at school and is ignored by his teachers. And then one day, he gets hit on the head by a pair of sneakers that seems to fall out of the sky. He doesn't know that they've been stolen from a baseball star, but because the cops find him with the sneakers, he gets arrested for theft and sent off to Camp Green Lake.

Green Lake is supposed to be a character-building juvenile detention center, but all Stanley seems to be building is great mounds of earth as he scoops mud out of the dry ground. His assignment, like that of the other boys at camp, is to dig holes "five feet deep, five feet across," all day, every day. The warden claims the digging will reform them, but there's something they're not being told. Now Stanley must dig up the truth about Camp Green Lake.

Perhaps Stanley's unfortunate situation has something to do with the chain of bad luck his family has suffered ever since his great-great-grandfather broke a promise to an old Egyptian woman called Madame Zeroni.