I don't like Steven Spielberg's movies but I still find myself watching them.

I think it's his bombastic style of storytelling I dislike, where heros and villains are exaggerated, details ignored, love triumphs, and all ends happily ever after. It's storytelling by numbers: too facile, too emotive, and, against my better judgement, too enjoyable.

Susan Casey's latest book, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Ocean's Greatest Furies, shares many of these traits.

Casey traces great waves, including mythical 'rogue' waves, across the globe and collects evidence from the people who study or are involved with large waves. Namely, scientists and surfers...but mainly surfers.

In need of a hero Casey finds one for her book in Laird Hamilton. Tall and square-jawed, he could be cast in any Spielberg epic. There's no need to have his exploits repeated, we all know what he's capable of. Yet as Casey is a non-surfer and the intended audience largely non-surfing the subject of his many feats and multiple injuries are repeated many times. Asked how many stitches he's had, "I stopped counting at 1000". Broken ankles? Left ankle, five times. And on it goes...

I'm sure there are some people thoroughly impressed by this but the impression for mine was of brawn over brains. A thought reinforced when, in one episode, Hamilton arrives in Tahiti and complains about the size of his rental car. "Like the car?" he asks Casey. "I could probably lift it."

See if you can say it without the Schwarzenegger accent.

The Wave has a few significant plotholes too. Casey sets 100 feet as the benchmark for really big waves. Something very few people have seen yet many people (read: surfers) are avidly chasing. Donning the white labcoat for a moment: it needs to be said that large waves travelling in open ocean, close to their source are very different beasts from large waves breaking near land and that surfers ride. The former are steep-sided, with short periods and located close to their source, the latter very long period and usually 1000's of kilometres from the winds that gave them life. The differences are numerous and striking, yet factors that have great bearing over each - such as period for instance - are paid scant attention by Casey.

It seems that as long as the waves are big and have the potential to scare us she'll whack them in a basket together, tie a knot around them and call it a theme.

But despite all this I kept on reading. In fact I was enthralled. Yeah, the scientific side is lacking and the protagonist a tosspot but Casey makes up for these shortcomings with a firm grip on language and masterful storytelling. Like Spielberg, Casey knows which strings to pull to hook an audience in. She can spin a yarn with deft turns of phrase and deliver it with timing, and it's this side of The Wave that gets you in.

The Wave is $32.95 from Random House.