Up a Crooked River

The four young Renfroes stared in consternation at the tubby little vessel tide up at the dock. That couldn’t be the ship that was supposed to take them up the river! They had expected to have fun on this trip to their new home in Florida, even with Aunt Mattie keeping them sternly on their best behavior. And now they’d be cooped up for days on that miserable little cheese box of a boat was simply nothing to do! 
It was precisely because she was so small, however, that the Palmetto Queen landed them within a few hours into the midst of the most magnificent adventure of their whole lives. 
How the little vessel became hopelessly marooned in the muddy bottom of the drained lake; how eleven oddly assorted people behaved in a situation both dramatic and absurd; how an opera singer, a hermit, and a gang of villainous jewel thieves played decisive roles; and how escape was finally contrived through this punk and ingenuity of the two of the Renfroes. 
The humor of every episode is heightened by the fact that the story takes place in the 1870s when mannered gentility was the fashion. Readers will chuckle with delight as affectations and artificialities melt away under the unifying influence of danger and discomfort, and real human beings enter with zest into the excitement of a bang-up adventure.