Title: Malibu Rising
Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Genre: Contemporary
First Publication: 2021
Language: English
Book Summary: Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
August,1983, it is the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone who is anyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: surfer and supermodel Nina, brothers Jay and Hud, and their adored baby sister Kit. Together, the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over – especially as the children of the legendary singer Mick Riva.
By midnight the party will be completely out of control.
By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames.
But before that first spark in the early hours of dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family will all come bubbling to the surface.
Book Review: Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
There’s something about cracking the spine on a new Taylor Jenkins Reid novel that just instantly transports you to a sun-dappled, retro-flavored fantasyland of sumptuous LA splendor and deliciously soapy family dysfunction. Malibu Rising, her latest immersive plunge into the tangled legacies of beautiful and brutally human people leading gloriously messy lives, is no exception. If anything, it might just be Reid’s most intoxicating distillation yet of the fatalistic Hollywood grandeur and behind-the-scenes disarray that’s always flickering beneath her perceptive authorial lens.
From those opening pages ushering us into the Malibu compound of the fabulous, epically troubled Riva clan on the morning of their legendary annual party in 1983, you can already feel the electric frisson of anticipation crackling alongside all the bubbles in the Veuve Clicquot. Reid has a true novelist’s knack for establishing a moodily evocative sense of impending chaos right from the jump – priming you for bombshell revelations and gloriously indulgent bad behavior even as she ladles out juicy detailing about the Rivas’ rich interior lives and gloriously decadent trappings.
Because that’s the real magic trick Reid keeps pulling off so effortlessly in Malibu Rising – she gets you willingly imbibing on all the aspirationally soapy deliciousness from a safe remove, passing the chilled glass of gossip liberally while still ensuring her core characters resonate with stunning emotional authenticity. These aren’t the hollow Eastwick archetypes you might find slinking through a bargain bin Jackie Collins potboiler; they’re achingly real people, deeply flawed and hypnotically alluring all at once.
Take the four Riva siblings at the dysfunctional heart of this deliciously tangled saga, for instance. By the time you’re done immersing yourself in their rich backstories – the toxic family curse born of past parental abandonment, the way their late mother’s patina of hollowed-out stardom has colored their respective paths of trauma-forged overachievement – you’ll be so viscerally invested in their redemptive struggles that every fresh skeleton uncovered starts to feel like a punch in the gut.
Again, that’s the nuanced genius of Reid’s authorial craft on full display in these radiant pages: She hooks you with impossibly lush detailing and moody Hollywood Babylon-esque atmospherics, but then she mercilessly guts you when you’re least expecting it. Have your tissues at the ready, because just when you think the narrative might veer into campy soap territory, Reid will cold cock you with a revelation about the depths of the Rivas’ pain and inherited psychological baggage that brings the emotional stakes into cringingly relatable clarity.
Part of what makes Reid’s novels so addictive – Malibu Rising very much included – is how she understands the universal yearning to get swept up in romanticized family melodrama while still grounding each fresh swerve in authentically rendered emotional truth. There’s a hard-hitting reality to the Rivas’ respective paths of childhood neglect, substance abuse corrosion, professional overcompensation, and tortured soul-searching. For all their glamour and cool-adjacent access, they’re desperate to keep an unruly id and a fatalistic belief in their own unworthiness from swallowing them whole.
And the way Reid interweaves those refrains of existential torment and burnished longing with straight-up deliciously soapy family feuding? Chef’s kiss! If your synapses don’t light up with glee and soapy schadenfruede every single time Nina Riva deploys one of her signature viper-ish burns to deflate her petulant nephews, you might just be a lost cause where massively entertaining fiction is concerned. Even the most ugly outbursts of that old Riva self-destruction feel rendered with the perfect cocktail of brutal honesty and decadent intrigue.
Which is exactly why Malibu Rising makes for such an irresistibly moreish summertime indulgence. On one level, you’re getting absolutely drunk off all the heat-soaked designer detailing about Malibu beach cribs and the Riva family’s absurdly lavish annual rager (the kinds of things that would make Vinny Chase himself blush at the excesses on display). But on a deeper level, Reid is excavating the pulpy mythology of her famous fictional clan all the way down to the bone – leaving you rattled by their gutting emotional reckonings even as you get swept up in the breathless will-they-won’t-they romantic entanglements and celeb cameos.
It’s gloriously messy, sun-splashed melodrama that somehow also has the power to leave you emotionally shaken and meditating deeply on that oldest of all human preoccupations – the corrosive legacies we pass down from generation to generation, and the desperate hunger to finally break free from those doomed ancestral cycles. For all the glitz and delicious tabloid indulgences crammed into its pages, Malibu Rising might just be Reid’s most profoundly moving, cathartic parable on self-determination yet.
So do yourselves a favor and grab this thing – whether it’s to burn on your most languid beach towel daydream session or end up devouring in one rapturous spirit-quest inhale at home. There is simply no better vessel for transporting yourself into the lush magical realms of golden California fantasies than Taylor Jenkins Reid’s lavishly burnished prose. And with Malibu Rising, she’s spun an intoxicating yarn that’ll leave you bassking in both the glow of a million feverish Hollywood daydreams and the mercilessly humane clarity of reconciling one’s darkest inherited demons. This is LA lit of the highest order – transcendent and indulgent, bursting with hard-won personal truths while still doing the grunt work of crafting a rapturous modern soap opera. In other words, it’s the perfect summer escape.
