“Now you’re nothing but tinsel. Flimsy tinsel, here one day, in the garbage can the next.”
Set primarily under the Californian sun and spanning 1955-1980, Melanie Benjamin’s historical California Golden (Delacorte Press 2023) is an easy read full of sunshine, salt water and grit. While I wish it had gone a bit deeper, it was still a very enjoyable read.
Mindy and Ginger have spent their entire lives trying to hold fast to their mother, Carol, and she’s spent much of their lives trying to pry their fingers from her’s. When their mother is forced to return from surfing in Hawaii because their dad left, she barely acknowledges them. Mindy quickly realizes they need a plan or the State will put them in foster care. Mindy becomes determined that they will both become surfers because that will guarantee their mother’s attention. Mindy is older, harder, and more talented on the board. Ginger, with stars in her eyes, is more tentative and just wants someone to want her. In sport where women competitors are still a novelty, the three beautiful blonds are certainly memorable. Things are going great until Mindy bests her mother at a competition.
Carol stops competing and then stops surfing all together. Mindy joins the Hollywood crowd, making a name for herself in the surfing movies as the Girl in the Curl. After being photographed hugging a man who photographs “too dark,” she has to reinvent herself and ultimately ends up going to Vietnam on an USO tour. Ginger falls in with a formerly talented surfer who grooms her, abuses her, and keeps her drugged. He becomes a follower of Timothy Leary, and Ginger will follow him wherever he goes because he makes her feel wanted.
The second part of the novel gives us Carol’s story; the story of a woman who never wanted to be married and never wanted to be a mother. A woman whose dreams of playing in the All-American League were crushed by an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy. A woman whose dreams of winning Makaha were crushed when she had to return to California because her husband had left the children she’d never wanted. Her pages are laced with resentment and shattered dreams.
Instead of finding the wave and riding it out, Benjamin barely scratches the surface. While this leaves the novel shiny and palatable, it left me hungry; I wanted a deeper dive into the racism, the USO tour, Leary, and the drug deals. Shoot. I wanted more surfing – the spills and bruises. I’d have loved it to have more grit and be more scuffed up. (Think Great Circle.)
But it is pretty and shiny in the sun. Like tinsel. (And it’ll be GREAT on screen. Not sure if it’s been optioned or not, but it needs to be.)
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 