Stanley Yelnats is an overweight middle schooler accused of stealing a famous baseball player's sneakers before they could be auctioned off for charity. It's not as if his bad luck is without precedent: the Yelnats family believes a Gypsy placed a curse on it long ago because of Stanley's "no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather." But that's another story altogether.As punishment Stanley is sent to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention center that's neither a camp nor a lake. There young boys dig holes in the ground where the lake once was, supposedly "to build character," but if they find anything "interesting" in their piles of dirt they're supposed to alert the camp's warden, whose curiosity is piqued by a gold-colored tube Stanley finds, upon which the initials "KB" are etched inside a heart. What exactly is the warden looking for under all that dirt? And will the Yelnats family's curse ever be lifted? Louis Sachar's beloved book, which was made into a movie starring Shia LaBeouf (Transformers) as Stanley in 2003, piles on one funny plot twist after another as various clues are uncovered. —Robert Cass
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