On a Wave - by Thad Ziolkowski (Paperback)

About the Book

In this prizewinning poet's wry and exhilarating coming-of-age story, a precocious boy discovers a new world--and a new understanding of himself and his troubled family---on the gleaming waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Like Daniel Duane's 1996 memoir, Caught Inside, On a Wave goes beyond the lore of the sport and brings to life its natural venue....Though Ziolowski's language is as brisk and frothy as Hawaiian surf, what makes this memoir so affecting is how he mines his emotional life as a child."

"The surfing competence that Ziolkowski achieved was considerable, but this memoir is more than an account of a sport mastered, It's a sharp, self-conscious portrait of the artist as a young grommet."