Taylor Jenkins Reid

 As some of you may know, for the past several years I have participated in the PopSugar Reading Challenge.  I enjoy the challenge because it introduces me to new authors and new genres I might not otherwise find.  Taylor Jenkins Reid is one of those authors.  I originally bumped into her a couple of years ago when I read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.  The title character is loosely based on Elizabeth Taylor, and for someone who grew up reading her great-aunt’s trashy celebrity magazines, I had to check it out for myself.  Read it - she captures that Golden Age of Movie Stars as royalty so well.

Ms. Reid does a fantastic job with characters and writing in the memoir style. She absolutely catches that casual style of speaking and writing in a conversational manner so it’s very easy to fall into reading.  From  Evelyn Hugo, I found my way to Daisy Jones and the Six, which has become one of my favorite audio books.

Daisy Jones and the Six is the story, told interview style, of the rise and fall of a rock and roll band, loosely based on Fleetwood Mac (you can guess who inspired the character of Daisy Jones).   I love the audio version, and highly recommend it over the written book (but that’s good, too).  It’s very easy to listen to, and each of the readers brings his or her own style to the characters, for a very realistic feel.  And it’s just a great story.  Highly recommend - two thumbs up.

After these two great successes, I went on a binge of her other books:  After I Do, One True Loves, Forever, Interrupted, and Maybe In Another Life.  I enjoyed all of them in that rainy Saturday, crack open a book, and lose yourself in it way.  Great characters I liked, not very complicated storylines, and generally happy endings.

But why oh why did I decide to read Maybe In Another Life over Halloween weekend?  It goes down the path of “what ifs”, and showing what happens if you chose to zag as well as the path when you decided to zig.  The veil between the here and now and what’s coming next is so thin already, and here I am, poking holes in it by checking out the multiverse.  There is nothing about my life I truly regret (except a very bad habit of procrastination and we are not going down that rabbit hole), and I dearly love my children, sons in law, and grandchildren, as well as my significant ex, Larry.  However, I did have a couple of bad nights as my psyche worked itself out in some lucid dreaming.  Which is not to say, that I am not recommending this book.  If you’re a fan of Taylor Jenkins Reid,  you’ll want to read it.

If you want to know more about Taylor Jenkins Reid and her writing style, here’s an article from the New York Times:  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/books/taylor-jenkins-reid-malibu-rising.html

And yes, Malibu Rising is on my To-Be-Read (TBR) list.  🙂