Austin Treat
SEEKING representation: Young Adult Contemporary Fiction / “Riding Whale” / 60k words / Action-Adventure
A year after graduating high school, nineteen year old Tommy Lacey is adrift. It’s 2002, and while his friends are off at college, he’s stuck slicing sashimi at a dive bar in Forks, Washington. Between shifts, he listens to his mother’s lessons on the Pacific Ocean and his native heritage, recorded on CDs she mails from prison. Meanwhile, his father is hiding from an underground casino owner, who comes to collect an insurmountable debt. Payment is extracted with the only thing he has left, his son. Tommy is forced to work off his father’s debt on an illegal whaling expedition, where he begrudgingly harvests the remains of the very same creatures his father used to hunt professionally—before commercial whaling was outlawed in 1970. Now Tommy must adapt to the rigors of processing whale oil with a young crew of equally debt-ridden strangers and a menacing Makah captain as sharp as the harpoons he’s known to throw—all while searching for the ocean’s most valuable treasure: a hunk of ambergris, or “floating gold,” produced only in the intestines of sperm whales. In the process, Tommy discovers the truth of his family’s tragic past and ultimately confronts the ocean’s deadliest predators, whose indefatigable wrath is accidentally provoked.
RIDING WHALE (60,000 words) is a YA adventure novel fueled by an age-old conundrum: Are we and our planet doomed to suffer the sins of our parents? In this action-packed seafaring tale, akin to Holes (Sachar) and Whalefall (Kraus), fans will identify with a young character searching for meaning in a fathomless world, who must confront a bewildering past in order to have any kind of future.
Contact the author at atreat1227@gmail.com or via his Instagram @a.u.treat. Thank you.
^ Illustration by Kendall Moore for “Cash Only,” Westwind 2022.
Riding Whale (excerpt)
Before she left, Mom taught me a valuable lesson: to study life and death, you have to get up close.
I have this hazy memory of us paddling together when I’m three years old—but sixteen years later, the details of her and I are fading like a message in the sand, slowly dissolving in the endless tide.
Many times I’ve drifted, and many times I’ve swam, and many times I’ve been a speck of star dust on the immeasurable yawn of the Pacific Ocean; and beyond, where water touches cloud and constellation, where even the horizon can’t reach, I can see myself floating from ocean to outer space. And what really scares me, to be honest, is I actually think I’ll find Mom there—repatriated to the stars.
Truth is the simple syrup that all good lies are mixed with. It’s amazing what creatures will believe to stay alive for just one more second…
Austin Treat 