A famous 18-year-old fiddle player, Beau, is abducted from her parents’ huge Sierra home at a birthday folk jam in her honor one summer in the early part of the 21st century. As a fire burns up the mountain while she is buried on the land under a pile of brush, she is found just in time.
A month later, much to her horror, she is abducted again, this time from a Berkeley music jam. The culprit – a crazy but brilliant classical violinist only known for his expert folk guitar playing – hides her away in an underground room in the Sierras so he can compel her to learn classical violin.
Pale, gaunt and shattered, can she escape?
When eleven-year-old Elizabeth is left to babysit her four-year-old sister one rainy night, neither of them expect the adventure that unfolds. Their parents don’t return home, and by morning there is a flood that fills the first floor of their house. Elizabeth must take initiative and make an agonizing decision: whether to stay put where her parents might find them, or to be brave and leave home to go in search of their parents. Dangers loom in either scenario. Then Elizabeth and her sister Amanda rescue a neighbor, seven-year-old Maya, and her cat. In this adventure for girls, the three lost children and the cat together set out in a little red boat, looking for their mothers and fathers. As they struggle to survive the flood waters, find food, and make their way among the ruins left behind by the rising tides, the quest forces Elizabeth to rise to new levels of courage, bravery, and resourcefulness she didn’t know she had. But will they find their families before it’s too late?
