TERRI SCHLICHENMEYER The Bookworm Sez Advertisement

Remember being 14? Remember the uncertainty of being on the very edge of adulthood, not quite a kid but not quite a grown-up? Remember the zits, the hormones, trying to fit in, trying to be accepted? Remember trying to figure out the opposite sex?

Well, OK, so that last one happened last week. But really.... do you remember the angst of being 14?

Fondly, Josh Wolk remembers those days. Wanting to recapture them one last time, he spent eight weeks as a camp counselor at an all-boys camp in New England. In his new book "Cabin Pressure," he writes about his summer as a 34-year-old teenage boy.

The spring before his impending wedding, Josh Wolk got a little scared. Not cold-feet, stand-her-up-at-the-altar scared but nervous about what came with marriage.

When someone gets married, doesn't that mean they have to settle down, raise a family, become responsible and stop being foolish? Doesn't that mean they have to have a -- gasp -- mortgage?

And then Wolk began having thoughts about the best years of his life. When he was a teenager, he spent summers at Eastwind, an all-boy camp on the edge of a lake in Maine. Every summer was filled with friendship, fun rituals, swimming, and male bonding. Was it possible to recapture those days? Since former campers and counselors were always welcome to return, Wolk applied for a job. A handful of weeks before his wedding, he packed a trunk with clothes and towels and headed for the woods.

Assigned to the Bears' cabin, Wolk tried to settle in with a band of fourteen-year-old boys, but he felt out of place. He wasn't sure how to connect with them. His jokes were met with eye-rolls. His teases fell flat.

But if being an "old man" in a camp filled with teenagers wasn't easy for Wolk, neither was being the nearly-oldest staff member. Wolk felt self-conscious and struggled to fit in with the other counselors.

Was summer camp always like this?

Do you sometimes wish you could kayak back to the halcyon days of teenagerdom? Reading "Cabin Pressure" is the first place to start.

Author Wolk perfectly captures teenage angst -- the desperate wanting to belong; the rejection by peers; the goofy, coltish path to maturity -- and proves that those feelings never really go away, no matter how old you get. But Wolk sparkles like a campfire in his hilarious descriptions of the kids in his cabin and the closeness he begins to enjoy after a couple of afternoons of backgammon and a goofy nickname session. Just by the moniker he's hung on these kids, you know exactly what each boy is like. I also laughed 'til I almost cried at some of Wolk's fellow counselors.

If the smell of wood smoke, the feel of a cold, wet swimsuit or another round of "Kumbaya" fills you with nostalgia, then pick up a copy of "Cabin Pressure" and remember those days again. I'm sure, when you close the back cover, you're going to want s'more.

"Cabin Pressure" by Josh Wolk, Hyperion, $22.95, 288 pages.