All his life, fifteen-year-old San Francisco Soames has been told he is just like his father. But when his father announces that he's moving in with another man, Cisco starts questioning the resemblance. To top it off, he's suspended from school for fighting - even though all he did was provide his face as the punching bag for the school bully - and then accused of putting an old man in a coma.

Things go from bad to worse when his parents want to send him from their small town in Vermont to British Columbia to keep him out of trouble.

Trouble is the last thing Cisco wants. All he wants is to be left alone so he can figure out just how things have gone so wrong. And British Columbia! That's two thousand miles away - who is going to keep an eye on his ten-year-old twin sisters while he's gone? Plus he'll be staying with his uncle, someone he's never even seen before, someone who runs a Rocky Mountain Dude ranch, someone who is known in the family as "Uncle Party."

Things couldn't get any worse, could they?