In this prizewinning poet's wry and exhilarating coming-of-age story,
Thad Ziolkowski's On a Wave poignantly looks back at adolescence in a
memoir of his surfing years. 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 difficult
family -- notably a new brooding and explosive stepfather -- by heading
for 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.
