Loved this one! Sunny dreamy California in the 1960s. Surf culture was rising. Two sisters, Mindy and Ginger fries up watching their mother Carol Donnelly be the opposite of everyone else’s mother. She surfed. She didn’t pick them up from school or swim lessons on time. She left them to go surfing in Hawaii and they weren’t sure she’d return. She did, though, because her adoring husband had had enough and left the girls. She raised the girls in the water, surfing. Mindy was a natural and as the oldest, she was confident and assured. Ginger was beautiful, but lacked confidence and didn’t love to surf. What follows is a story of how their mothers choices changed them and their family dynamic. Mindy found fame while ginger found an abusive partner and a cult. No more spoilers. Read and find out. Did the sisters survive? What happened to Carol? Definitely five stars!

California Golden is that kind of book that is perfect for the beach or a lazy vacation. The vibes are 70s surf culture mixed with the wild ride of that era in general. The author’s writing style is not my favorite, but the story itself and the characters, for me, made it more palpable. I really enjoyed the characterization of this family and sisters who had a real relationship with negative and positive times. The story was emotional, felt real, and had a lot of heavy feelings along with a light vibe that somehow worked. I enjoyed it overall!

This book is the best hazy summer read with its sunny location in Malibu California, and the late 60s-70s early surf culture.

It is a story of women in the early days of the sport seen through the eyes of two sisters whose mother is at the forefront of women in a mostly male-dominated sport. A mother who is distant both in being around and emotionally when she is.

As you read, you follow the sisters and their relationship with each other. It is a real relationship, with ups and downs in their differences in personality and their abilities on the surfboard.

It is an emotional read, with tragedy and courage. Well written and well-paced. It is a book you will find hard to put down.

This story is unwashed in the history of the 60s and 70s, from the obvious surf culture history to the Vietnam War to the early days of the Whiskey A Go-Go.

I loved everything about it, and def recommend picking up California Golden and spending the day soaking up the sun while reading.


** This book releases on August 8th. Thank you Net Galley and Random House for the advance copy **

The premise to this summer read sounded excellent, but unfortunately I hated the writing style and the characters fell a bit flat for me..

A page-turner of summer read traveling back through the 60s and 70s.

I enjoyed the exploration of the flawed protagonists, a pro surfer mother and her two daughters. The trio challenge gender roles while at the same time getting tangled up in some of them. The mother pushes aside 60s expectations that women keep house and focus their time on motherhood. Instead, she does the bare minimum and runs off to surf every chance she gets. Her two daughters follow in her wake, the older one enthusiastically and the younger one just so she doesn’t get left behind.

Still, the two daughters struggle to find stability and acceptance in the face of their mother’s neglect and father’s abandonment.

Despite the thrills and power the women feel, the surfing world is filled with sexism, including bikini contests, and men who shut out women from the best waves. A charismatic male surfer romances the younger sister, then turns menacing.

The reader confronts the pull between pursuing one’s passions for their own sake and the external validation and trendiness of surfing in the 60s. One daughter works her way from surf movie extra to stuntwoman, to a star in her own right. But when the cinematic surfer trend ends, the star older daughter is left to scrape together an independent existence.

In addition to her career struggles, the older daughter faces family conflict.
The aging mother is pushed aside in the surfing celebrity world for her young, attractive daughters, causing intractable jealousy.

The author skillfully weaves the central conflict throughout the book in a way that makes it a real page turner. The reader follows, curious out about what caused the final rift between mother and daughters.

As much as I enjoyed this book, I would have liked more development and exploration of the characters of color. I especially would have liked to learn about the history of Hawaii’s indigenous surf culture—something the characters touch upon but never dive into.

Genre: Historical Fiction/Surfing
Publisher: Random House
Pub. Date: November 8, 2023

I've read and thoroughly enjoyed the majority of Melanie Benjamin's books. Her specialty is creating fictional accounts of real-life people. Her novels that I devoured include "The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb,” (Mercy Lavinia),"The Swans of Fifth Avenue" (Truman Capote), and "The Girls in the Picture" (Mary Pickford). My favorite was "The Aviator's Wife" (Anne Morrow Lindbergh). However, all of them are excellent. "California Golden," her most recent novel, might be her first historical fiction that is not based on a real-life person. I am not sure.

This is a coming-of-age story set amidst California's sun-drenched, beautiful beaches. We meet a dysfunctional mother and her two daughters during the 60s surfing scene in Southern California. Carol, the mother, despite sexism, is among the first women to compete professionally with men in the water sport. The author made her a complex character who is easy to hate. Her commitment to her sport makes her a dreadful mom to the point of being abusive.

Her daughters, Mindy and Ginger, are raising themselves after Carol left them to surf in Hawaii's powerful waves. Benjamin has her becoming somewhat motherly when the girls learn to surf. A flaw in the novel is that Carol's backstory is told in one chunk in the middle of the book instead of throughout the novel, which would have given us a better understanding of her.

For those looking for something other than surfing, there is much drama in the story: romance, unwanted pregnancies, drugs, battered woman syndrome. Things get very interesting when Mindy outshines her mom in the water. Additionally, for those who remember the Gidget TV show and movies, you will enjoy when the sisters are hired to act in them. I thought of Sally Field when she was in the TV show with its cheesy lines such as “Honest to goodness it's the absolute ultimate!” However, this book is the opposite of plucky, naïve teenage girl’s tale. There is no Moondoggie here. The story can get dark.

The scenes describing the endless summer with the beauty of the big waves enchanted me. I learned through the protagonists that big wave surfing is a discipline where brave surfers paddle into waves over twenty feet high. As I was fascinated, I googled and discovered that Carol may be modeled after Mary Ann Hawkins who was one of the first professional female surfers. Benjamin’s latest work is not one of my favorites by her. Still, it is a good read. As usual, Benjamin’s research shines. In this one, readers learn about the sport of surfing while becoming immersed in a compelling family drama. I recommend reading "California Golden.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this novel, releasing August 8th!

Decent historical fiction but extremely frustrating characters. Benjamin's writing was readable but not particularly enticing, and the book seemed to be trying to cover a lot of ground for the time period (Hollywood, the surfing revolution, women's rights, cults, early discussions of colonialism) but felt in many ways like it only touched the surface of all of these.

Set around the beginning of the surfing craze in California, California Golden follows the lives of two sisters with a surfing goddess of a mom. They were deserted by her and then their dad. The sisters enact a plan to keep mom hone, learning to surf and compete with her as her yearning to leave for Hawaii and the big waves keeps her from being happy as a mom. Reminiscent of Malibu Rising and Daisy Jones and the Six with that same time period and immersion into the hippy drug culture of California in the 1960's.

Set in 1960s California, this is the story of the famous Donnelly girls, beautiful blond girls in love with the ocean. We learn of Carol, mother to two daughters - Mindy and Ginger - and the path Carol took in order to find happiness. Mindy, the prize-winning surfer, the responsible sibling is the one who had to keep strong in order to keep her family safe. And Ginger…I wanted to shake her so bad for all her life choices. It all tied beautifully in the end. It had a very slow start, and some of the dates are off, but aside from that, the story was amazing!

Thank you for a copy of this fun summer story of women, summer, surfing and expectations of what women should be doing in the past. It tells the story of the Donnelly sisters and how they grew up, took very different paths and where those paths took them, all in the beautiful, beachy setting of California. I loved the strong female characters, the setting and how the story sucked me completely into these women lives.

I want to thank Random House/Ballantine Delacourte Press and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review California Golden by author Melanie Benjamin. She previously wrote The Aviator’s Wife and The Swans of Fifth Avenue which I thoroughly enjoyed
California Golden taught me more about surfing in California and Hawaii in the 1900’s than I ever needed or wanted to know!

What started as a slow burn turned into a book I couldn't devour fast enough!

California Golden was my first book by Melanie Benjamin. I am a big fan of historical fiction and this book was a great read.

California Golden follows sisters Ginger and Mindy as they navigate childhood with a neglectful mother whose only passion is for the beach and surfing. I really loved the dichotomy of Ginger, down a dangerous path, and Mindy, a famous surfer turned celebrity, as they grow up and navigate life. There were lots of dramatic twists that kept me reading chapter after chapter and wanting to know more of the sisters lives. The last part of the book also gave the mothers perspective which I enjoyed as well.

If you're a fan of California, the beach, or even the book "Malibu Rising" I highly recommend reading this book1!

Thanks NetGalley and Random House Publishing - Ballantine for this ARC. You can pick up California Golden on August 8!

This was a good read! I really enjoyed it as a summer read. I would recommend it to others and read more books from this author.

I feel a bit ambivalent about this book. As a child in the 60’s I recall the hippie culture, surfing movies, Gidget and the Beach Boys. I also remember the difficult political situation, drugs and racism. As a fan of historical fiction I looked forward to this book. The author tried to touch on all of these issues but I think it was a bit too ambitious. I would have liked to learn more about the surfing culture since it was clearly about more than just California kids riding on surfboards. I didn’t feel much sympathy for the main characters and I felt the ending was bit too contrived. It was an easy read but I didn’t learn much from it.

Read in June 2023
I received the ARC ebook through Netgalley in exchange for my honest book review.

What first drew me in to this book was the beautiful and vibrant cover and the interesting synopsis. I'm a sucker for anything set during the hippie era, especially when it's in California and I love a good beach read.

Basically this is a coming of age story set amidst the beaches of California, this story is about the Donnelly women: the surfer obsessed mother Carol, and her 2 daughters, Mindy and Ginger. The reader is introduced to the non typical family dynamics from the get go. A father who's so distraught and depressed over his wife not loving him enough that he ultimately then leaves his daughters. A mother who never really wanted the domestic life and longs to live a carefree one out on the water, sitting on a surfboard, with no one to answer to. She often abandons her husband and daughters and takes off with a bunch of fellow hippies/surfers for trips to Hawaii or spends her days at the beach, neglecting her children. This impacts the daughters in profound ways, with the youngest Ginger growing increasingly fearful of being "left behind" and forgotten, and growing into the type of woman who is needy and desperate for love and attention, falling into the hands of a homeless, surf god and cult leader, who takes advantage of her at the young age of 15. Mindy, despite claiming to love her family to a fault and thinking her duty is to keep the women together by wanting and encouraging her sister to take up surfing, will do anything to be "seen" and loved in her own way and pushes her younger sister aside to focus her all on becoming the next best female surfer, neglecting her family as well.

I wanted to love this story so much just based off the synopsis (1960s and 1970s California, beaches, surfing, love story), however, once I started to read it, I quickly grew to despise these characters. I'm all for the underdog but these characters were just plain awful. Their mother was despicable and selfish with no redeeming qualities, don't get me started on her. Mindy, who I wanted to like the most in the first few pages, was easily identified as a narcissist who clearly had no true love for her family and only cared about herself. Her inner dialogue had me wanting to slap her and make her look inward. (Don't you see how awful and shallow you are?!) And poor Ginger, she didn't stand a chance with how the older women in her life influenced her. These characters weren't role models and came across as needy, pathetic, and persistently annoying. There were entire chapters where the characters would just whine about their circumstances and justify why they did the things they had to do/wanted to do, with no regard for any of their so called loved ones.

In terms of the writing, it wasn't very good and didn't entice me to read the entire book or focus hard on it. Needless to say, I had trouble getting into it, even after more than a few chapters had passed by. If I cannot connect with a character in a book, then it's ultimately not going to work out for me. I found myself day dreaming and skimming through sections of fluff that seemed irrelevant to the plot. Even some of the more interesting scenes just felt lackluster to me and didn't hold my attention. Furthermore, the characters' banter and dialogue just didn't appeal to me and didn't feel genuine. It felt like someone who's never had a real conversation with a human was writing the dialogue scenes. It made me think of a bad Lifetime movie that made me cringe. (Does anyone really talk like that?!)

Unfortunately, all of these issues combined together and made me not want to read this book in it's entirety. I read the first 30% , then glanced through a few random chapters, and the mother's personal chapter, then the last chapter and was so disappointed and frustrated over my wasted time. There wasn't one thing I can think of that would make this book enjoyable. While I thoroughly love the 60s and 70s vibes, this book could not make me read through the overly long descriptions of their makeup, clothes, music, popular celebrities of that era, and nightlife scenes. I just didn't believe that the author was ever a young and hip person, and everything about this lifestyle felt cringy and made up, like she was trying way too hard. There are reasons why other books with similar storylines, such as Malibu Rising or Daisy Jones and The Six, are easily a 4 and 5 star read because they feel authentic, drawing the reader in, making them want to find out more, an effortless reading experience you crave - The reader doesn't have to try to convince themselves that the characters are real people. However with California Golden, it felt drastically opposite. A bad sitcom I wanted to turn off immediately.

Sadly, I have to give this a 1 star review because I just couldn't force myself to continue reading this and couldn't make myself get into the dismal writing and less than desirable characters.

Melanie Benjamin is well known for her historical novels and I was delighted to find the history chosen for this book to be more recent. It deals with the cultural challenges of two sisters left to fend for themselves in the era of free love, surfer movies and the women exercising their rights to compete in sports, specifically surfing. The book addresses a wide range of issues from racism to the drug culture, neither glossing over the hardships faced by people pulled into various lifestyles.
Mindy and Ginger tried to keep their family together, but neither of their parents had the girl’s interest at heart. Left to find their own places in a world of dangerous and competitive surfing, the girls chose opposite paths. Their stories are frustrating and heartbreaking. Having lived through this era, I don’t always respect the decisions the characters make, but it was fascinating to read it from a different perspective.
Golden California will be released on August 8, 2023, in time for a few last trips to the beach, either to read, or hop on a surfboard! Thanks to the Publisher, Random House Publishing Group Ballantine and NetGalley for the ARC.

Thank you for the chance to read California Golden. I loved Malibu Rising and read reviews that this was a good one to read if you liked that one. I will say it was a slow burn but I was fully invested. It tells the story of the Donnelly women, a mom, and two daughters who love surfing when it was a male dominated sport. I loved how it went through their journey all their struggles with each other. At times I found myself wanting to shake them all! I don't usually read historical fiction but I enjoyed this one.

I’ve enjoyed Melanie Benjamin’s books for years, and California Golden is no exception. It tells the story of Carol Donnelly and her two daughters, Mindy and Ginger, who centered their lives in the world of California surfing in the 1950-60s.

We hear the stories of each of the women separately, and then as they interact together as a family. They come and go in and out of each others lives, growing apart and together in waves. And along the way we learn a lot about the history of surfing and the role of women in surfing, the entertainment industry, and the hippie/drug culture during that era.

I really enjoyed this—although there were times that I wanted to shake some sense into each of the women!
There were overtones of some other current novels centered on California and show business, but California Golden was unique in its focus and emotion. I loved it, and I think you will too!

Thanks to NetGalley and publisher for providing me with an advance ebook in return for an honest review.

Took me back to my youth. Wonderful story
Family drama and surfing magic. A lot of highs and lows, like real life.
Great summer escape.

At this point I did not finish. I had trouble getting into the characters. I would anticipate I may finish in the future.