Holes

Stanley Yelnats is sent to Camp Green Lake — a juvenile detention facility in the Texas desert with no lake, no shade, and one rule: every boy digs one hole every day, five feet wide and five feet deep, ostensibly to build character. Stanley suspects the holes are being dug for another reason entirely. Sachar weaves three timelines — Stanley's present, his great-great-grandfather's curse, and the 19th century outlaw Kissin' Kate Barlow — to show how injustice accumulates across generations and eventually, improbably, resolves. The most complete satirical portrait of the American juvenile justice system ever written for children — a story that names the gap between what institutions claim to do and what they actually do with the comic precision of someone who has thought very carefully about how to make that argument to a ten-year-old. Newbery Medal winner.