It's an odd choice for entertainment, a kids' story about boys being maltreated in a desert juvenile detention camp, forced to dig holes over and over to satisfy a sadistic warden. Then you discover they're actually looking for buried treasure, in a kind of brute force shovel brigade, and it becomes quite entertaining... although I can't help wondering why the warden just didn't use a metal detector and be done with it. You'd think it would be a lot simpler, and a lot cheaper, and a lot less evil to take advantage of helpful technology, but no. Evil is stupid. Nonetheless the friendship between Stanley and Zero is well done, and I liked their great escape, fuelled by ancient peach liquor (let's face it, that shit fermented over the generations) hidden under a boat named for a donkey. There's just enough sly ridiculousness in here to offset the really pretty grim setting...