For the first half of this novella, I confess I was ready to award two stars. The protagonist is a teen surfer called Ward, and I did not enjoy the language. (When I say that I'm not referring to swearing, but the fact that every other sentence felt like, you know, I mean like, yeah? And I've never seen so many run-on sentences in my life, although admittedly they gave a sense of rhythm to the text.) Thank goodness in the second half the descriptions of water, of the ocean, took over. In fairness this was a strong feature of the first half too, but the hammering informality of the language, echoing teen boy patterns as it did, just overshadowed everything else for a while.

The book's really more prose poetry than prose, very loosely structured and shifting out of first and third person, exploring Ward's relationship with the sea and with his father. Like many novellas, it's less about plot than image and emotional resonance, and for me the first was the most successful here. Novella or not, Ward spent so much time moping over his family circumstances that I spent a good part of the book hoping he'd be eaten by a shark.