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Stanley Yelnats IV is an out-of-luck teen who suffers constant misfortune as a result of a curse placed on his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing, great-great grandfather. When sneakers suddenly fall from the sky and hit Stanley, he finds himself in a whole new type of bad luck as the sneakers were a special donation to a charity from a popular athlete Clyde Livingston, and the police decides Stanley stole them. With the choice between a jail or a juvenile correction camp, Stanley chooses the latter and thus arrives at Camp Green Lake. There, Stanley and the other boys are forced to dig holes five feet deep, and five feet wide in the now dry bed of the camp's enormous lake every day. Stanley eventually realizes that they are digging these holes because the Camp Warden is searching for something likely hidden in the lake bed. As Stanley continues to dig holes, he befriends the other boys at the camp, and learns to adapt to this new misfortune. In a separate plot, Stanley's great-great-grandfather, Elya Yelnats, (as a young man) receives a pig from the Gypsy Madame Zeroni woman to use as trade for the hand in marriage of a local maiden, Myra Menke. Acting on Madame Zeroni's instructions, Elya carries the pig each day to a certain spring and has it drink the spring's water while he sings it a particular song. When the pig is fully grown, he offers it to Myra's father, who is unable to decide whether Elya's pig or that of his rival Igor Barkov is the better. When Myra is unable to choose either of her suitors as a husband, Elya becomes disgusted and leaves for America. As he is leaving, he realizes that he has failed his promise to Mad Zeroni woman, who had wished that Elya would carry her to the summet and sing to her. One hundred and ten years before Stanley arrives at Camp Green Lake, the town of Green Lake is a wonderful place where peach trees bloom throughout the spring. In this Texas town, the beautiful young schoolteacher, Katherine Barlow, falls in love with Sam, the onion seller. Sam sells onions grown from a special area to eat and to use for medicinal purposes, and Katherine hires him for manual labor in exchange for her home-made spiced peaches. While Katherine and Sam are alive, racism is institutionalized in the United States and it is against the law for a black man to kiss a white woman. Because Sam is black and Katherine is white, the people in the town become irate when they find that Katherine and Sam have kissed. Charles, or Trout, Walker, the richest man in town has always wanted to marry Katherine, and when he finds out that she is in love with Sam, he gathers the townspeople to burn the schoolhouse and kill Sam and his beloved donkey Mary Lou. Katherine seeks help from the local sheriff but instead finds that the sheriff, who makes lewd advances towards her, also wants to kill Sam. Katherine and Sam attempt to escape but Sam's boat is destroyed while only half way across the lake and Sam is killed and Kathrine was rescued against her own will. After the day that Sam is killed, rain stops falling on Green Lake and the lake dries up. Katherine is driven mad by her grief and becomes an outlaw known as Kissin' Kate Barlow. Her name refers to the fact that she kisses the men she kills, leaving a lipstick imprint of her lips on their faces. In her twenty years of robbing people in the west, she happens to rob Stanley's great-grandfather while he is on his way from New York to Texas. Since Green Lake dried up, the citizens of the town all moved away, and Kate buries her loot somewhere around the lake, only to be later captured by Charles Walker and his wife Linda (a former student of Katherine's). They try to torture her into revealing its location, but Kate has the final laugh as she is bitten by a poisonous yellow lizard, and dies with the loot's location secret. Since her death, the Green Lake has been virtually deserted and the land is owned by the Walker family for a long time. Eventually, Camp Green Lake is founded for juvenile delinquents. As expected, Stanley has a hard time digging holes, due to the incredible heat and the tough, dry ground. Stanley finds digging the holes difficult at first because he is unused to the labor like the other boys are. Whenever an item is found at the camp, the Warden takes the find and gives the finder the day off from digging. In his first couple weeks there, Stanley finds a golden tube with the initials KB inscribed on it. He is then approached by the leader of the boys at the camp called X-Ray (his name is actually the pig latin version of Rex) who asks Stanley to give up his find because it was unfair that Stanley could get a day off in the weeks of his digging when X-Ray had dug for 18 months without a single find. Stanley gives the golden tube to X-Ray and he takes the credit for the find, far away from where it was originally found. Stanley wonders if the Kate Barlow used to live in the area because the initials on what was later discovered to be a lipstick tube were KB for Kate Barlow. He also now knows that they are not just "building character" but "are" looking for something as well. Stanley finds out that Zero can't read or write and that his real name is Hector Zeroni. Zero starts digging a part of Stanley's hole every day so that Stanley can teach him how to read. But before Stanley finishes, the Warden finds out about the deal and, along with the other counselors, insults him and calls him stupid because he can't spell a word correctly. Zero runs away from camp, and the Warden destroys Zero's files to keep anyone from looking for him. Stanley, in an effort to save him, follows after a few days later. Stanley takes MR sir's truck and drives the vehicle straight into a hole which had been dug by one of the boys in group D. He finds Zero under Sam's old boat with "Mary Lou" painted on it. Zero and Stanley drink some liquid in bottles under the boat that Zero calls sploosh, which in actuality is the fermented remains of Katherine's spiced peaches. Zero later vomits, presumably because of bacteria in the sploosh. The two help each other to reach the top of a big mountain, which turns out to be Sam's old onion field. Because Zero is very weak, Stanley carries him up this mountain and finds a spring. While Zero drinks, Stanley sings the family's song to keep his spirits up. As Stanley and Zero are living on the mountain, Zero reveals that he was actually the person who stole the sneakers at the beginning of the novel, and threw them off a bridge and hoped for the best. They survive on onions for a week and then return to camp, planning to search for Kate Barlow's treasure, in the hole where Stanley found the lipstick tube. After digging for about half a night, Stanley and Zero find an old suitcase, which they believe is loaded with Kate's loot. The Warden finds them, and attempts to take the suitcase from them, but she finds out there was a nest of yellow-spotted lizards in the hole. She also reveals that she and her family had been forced to dig by their grandparents every day in order to find the suitcase and it is indicated that she had made up the camp so that she could have some people to do the digging for her. Stanley's lawyer, Ms. Morengo, arrives to pick up Stanley, as he has been proven innocent back in civilization, the Attorney General arrived as well. Hours later, Stanley finally gets out of the hole. The Warden tries to take the suitcase, saying that the suitcase was hers, but then Zero points out the fact that the suitcase has "Stanley Yelnats" printed on it. It turns out, Kissin' Kate used Stanley's grandfather's case to store the loot. As the lawyer states that the case is rightly Stanley's, the warden watches, dumbfounded and having dismally failed to gain the treasure that her family has been searching for over a century, as they leave the camp, and expose the truth to its real intent. Zero is also allowed to leave because they have no file on him, and there is no reason for him to stay. When Stanley and his family are finally able to pry the case open months later, Stanley discovers that the suitcase contains many valuable items, and the once poor Yelnats are suddenly rich. At the end of the book, Stanley's newfound luck is explained, as Zero is really Madame Zeroni's great, great, great grandson, and because Stanley carried him up the mountain, and fed him the spring water, the curse was broken. Zero is reunited with his mother, from whom he was separated many years ago, and Stanley's father finally succeeds in inventing something: a cure for foot odor. While fate has so often seemed against Stanley, in the end it serves to help him, his family, his new friends of Camp Green Lake, and Zero. []