Synopses & Reviews
In this prizewinning poet's wry and exhilarating coming-of-age story, a precocious boy discoversa new world--and a new understanding of himself and his troubled family---on the gleaming waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Evocative and quietly mesmerizing, Thad Ziolkowski's On a Wave is a poignant look back at adolescence, a memoir of his surfing years that Time magazine called "a sunbleached 1960s period piece--a wistful, white-collar daydream." As a disenchanted, unemployed English professor, Thad decides one day to sneak away from his temp job in Manhattan and catch a wave off a dingy Queens shoreline. In the meager cold waves, he contemplates how he could have possibly become a semidepressed, chain-smoking, aimless man when for a few shining years of his boyhood, he was invincible. His lapsed love affair with the ocean begins amid the late-sixties counterculture in coastal Florida. After his parents' divorce, nine-year-old Thad escapes from his the thrilling, uncharted waters of the local beach. In the embrace of the surf, he is able to stay offshore for years, until his life is upended once again, this time by a double tragedy that deposits him at a crossroads between a life in the waves and a life on land. Lyrical and disarmingly funny, On a Wave is a glorious portrait of youth that reminds readers of Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Frank Conroy's Stop-Time.
Synopsis
A disenchanted English professor decides on a whim one day to sneak off from his job in Manhattan and catch a wave off a dingy Queens shoreline. "On a Wave" is an unpretentious portrait of youth in the tradition of Tobias Wolff's "This Boy's Life" and Frank Conroy's "Stop-Time."