Up a Crooked River by May McNeer and Lynd Ward

Exceptional Tales for Exceptional Kids

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 the spunk and ingenuity of the two 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.

Up a Crooked River is the happily combined work of a distinguished husband and wife team, Lynd Ward (1905 - 1985) and May McNeer Ward (1902 - 1994). May Ward wrote extensively for what she called “medium age” children, chiefly on historical subjects. Lynd Ward, an expert in both woodcut and lithography, illustrated many beautiful limited editions, as well as trade editions of books for both adults and children. 

“Adventure in the 1870's with an unusual twist — a river boat stuck on a treacherous Florida swamp lake — occurs fantastically but believably in the lives of four children and their aunt. They are riding the small Palmetto Queen, on route from Charleston to a new plantation home, up the Oklawaha River, and have as traveling companions two ineffectual young lawyers, an Italian opera star and her maid and a blustering Captain. 

When the Palmetto Queen goes aground in Vanishing Lake, it is the young Renfroes, particularly Randy, 14, and his tomboy sister, Pug, 12, who prove to be the only practical and capable passengers. Their efforts to find help take them into the marshes, inhabited not only by snakes and cranes but by a wise old hermit, Muskie McGee, who is cooperative, and by untrustworthy hunters, who are not. The singer turns out to be a product of the backwoods, and not an Italian, whose knowledge of Indians and such is most welcome. A bright, humorous episode ends with the Queen safely on her way and all the voyagers better friends. The Florida swamp “atmushphere” is effective.” KIRKUS REVIEWS