‘Magnificent and mundane’ is a lovely description of time passing for children. And this had been a magnificent day for all of them. She knew that childhood is made up of days magnificent and mundane. …the children had found a previously undiscovered part of themselves that day. When the children first surf, June observes – Their children, described through the eyes of June, were believable. Small boundaries broken, snapped like tint twigs, so many that June barely noticed he was coming for the whole tree. The best part of this book was the story of Mick and June, and their ill-fated relationship –Īnd on and on it went. In fact, they were so clumsy, I wondered how old Reid was – did she have to research the eighties because she wasn’t familiar with them? (she was born in 1983, so yeah, she would have had to do her research). The eighties references read like an afterthought, and were almost exclusively about what people were wearing, or what they were listening to on the radio. I’m not sure why because the ‘ingredients’ are solid – professional surfers, Malibu beach, set in the eighties – but these scene-setters were diluted with too many superfluous characters, and a house party that is described in laborious detail (a stark contrast to the first half of the book which covers decades of the family’s history). Reid has used the same ingredients for her latest novel, Malibu Rising, but unfortunately the result lacks the magic of Daisy. Because even if Daisy Jones & The Six wasn’t your usual genre, there was something appealing about it – the nostalgia, the music alive on the page, the glamour and grunge of the industry.
If I had the energy to rewind to all of the blog posts from December 2020 titled ‘Most anticipated books of 2021’, I suspect that Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid would feature heavily.
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