Holes (by Louis Sachar)

Louis Sachar's HOLES jumps around in time and place as he weaves his intricate tapestry of intersecting stories. An old Egyptian wise woman whose curse resounds down the generations, a schoolmarm whose love for a black man destroys both their lives, a boy abandoned by his mother at a playground, a girl consumed with anger and greed as she watches the downfall of her family -- when all these disparate stories finally come ringing into their places, it's like hearing the perfect orchestral chord.

Sachar pulls together this complicated story with unusual characters, dark humor, inventive plotting, and some Dickensian coincidences. The harshness of the situation is mitigated by the multifaceted mystery and by the strangely lighthearted way the author tells the story. At the end the author deliberately leaves a few holes in the plot for the reader to fill in. Sachar has a bizarre imagination, and in this vivid, many-layered book he puts it to its most compelling use yet.