Review Detail

Nicholas and his twin sisters Hayley and Hetty are sent to a small Ohio lake front town to stay with their great Uncle Nick while their father is off with Doctors Without Borders and their mother (from whom he is divorced) is busy with work in New York City. At first, Nicholas thinks that the summer will be completely boring... until he finds a movie his father made, meets Charlie (a really great baseball player and a girl), and learns to sail. His sisters are deep into Arthur Ransome's We Didn't Mean to Go To Sea and talking in British accents. It turns out that Charlie's mother Fran was a friend of their dad's, and was even interested in him romantically until the movie filming took a bad turn. A scripted boat crash went horribly wrong, and Fran was hit by the mast of the boat, broke her arm, and lost the movie camera. Nicholas and Charlie suspect foul play, so have Fran recreate the boat scene and tell them all the people who were involved in the filming. They then talk to them, look at the wreckage of the boat, and unearth the camera from an unusual source. Meanwhile, Hetty and Hayley plan a boat trip ala Ransome, but things go badly there, with a neighbor having an emergency on shore and a storm rolling in. Nicholas and the twins stay with the boat and rescue a man who has wrecked his boat... and who knows more about the film incident than anyone else they've talked to. Nicholas and Charlie work on completing the father's film, filling in some back story. What are the chances that the two parents, whose romance was so cruelly cut short, might get back together? And what are Nicholas' chances of having a romance of his own?