Stanley Yelnats, whose name reads the same backwards and forwards, is cursed by his family's history of bad luck, which started when his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather did not actually steal a pig, but broke a promise to a one-legged Gypsy. And so it does not come as too big a surprise when he is convicted of a crime he did not commit and sent to a juvenile detention centre in the desert, where he has to dig a hole every day, five feet deep and five feet across. This is supposed to be just a character building exercise, but the Warden takes a strange interest in what the boys dig up.