A mother's dying wish. A son in search of answers. A fifteen-day surf odyssey with the California girl who will dare him to rethink everything. Alone after his mother's unexpected death, seventeen-year-old Shep leaves Texas to crash with his uncle's family in Malibu. Before he can hang his cowboy hat, Shep learns something that blows his mind-in her youth, his hard-working single mom was a gifted surfer on her way to international fame. And her dying wish was for him to recreate the surf tour she completed when she was eighteen-the summer she got pregnant with him. Along with his cousin Carmen (the red-blooded competitive surfer) and her best friend Samantha (the opinionated and mildly annoying beach goddess), Shep hits the road for a surf trip up and down Pacific Coast Highway. Armed with his mother's ashes and fifteen sealed envelopes-each containing a page from her high school diary-Shep will discover a new side of the complex woman he'd only thought of as Mom, and might finally learn the identity of a man he's never met-his father. But each time he paddles out into the waves, a nagging question haunts him-the one he may not be ready to answer: Is he learning to surf because he wants to honor his mother's dying wish, or running from the real reason he can't go back to Texas-his own terrible mistake?