Malibu Rising Review

This is yet another book that I have listened to on Spotify, and unfortunately another novel that I have not really enjoyed. Taylor Jenkins Reid is not my favourite author and I found her previous work just fine and definitely overhyped, but I heard good things about ‘Malibu Rising’ so I decided to give it a chance. If it has changed my opinion of Taylor Jenkins Reid, it was not for the better.

‘Malibu Rising’ is about the Riva family, now consisting of four siblings and their estranged father- Mick Riva, a successful singer and performer. The structure of counting down until the massive fire engulfing Malibu and flashbacks to Mick and his wife’s meeting and many breakups was probably the most interesting part of the story and was utilized successfully. However, nothing else truly worked well.

First of all, Taylor Jenkins Reid is known for her temporal settings such as the Golden Age of Hollywood in ‘Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo’ or the 1970 in ‘Daisy Jones & the Six’. In the other two novels, there were clear indications that this was when the story took place. The way the characters spoke and the values they had, as well as the events referenced put the stories firmly into their timelines. This novel had none of that. In a way, if there were no clear indications in the chapters of the years when the events took place, I would half expect the characters to just whip out their mobile phones and start texting each other, even if the modern part of the story was set in 1983.Just because they occasionally used the 1980s surfers slang, did not take this feeling out of me.

Speaking of characters, they were all quite bland. I am not sure how the author managed to make four of the siblings who have gone through hell and back and who we are clearly supposed to be rooting for so uninteresting and pointless as protagonists. Nina was the only one with a nick of personality and even she was a doormat for others until the last couple of chapters. Beyond that and occasional dilemma about how she was making money to support herself and her siblings, there was not much else to say about her. There was even less to say about the other three siblings, as they follow very strict and clear tropes. They all had a lot of potential to be interesting and introduce important discussions about consequences of parental abandonment, poverty and alcoholism, but the author was constantly just telling us facts, rather than showing them. More attention was paid to the fact that two brothers had sex with the same woman than their actual relationship prior to this. How was I supposed to feel that one of them got betrayed and care about that when I don’t know them at all?

Additionally, the writing itself left a lot to be desired. The structure worked and I was curious for a while, but the chapters dragged on and on and I will admit I started listening to the audiobook on 2x speed just to get through some of it. A lot of the dialogue, especially between couples was…cringy for the lack of the better word and not at all romantic. I felt like her other works are on the edge of being melodramatic, but she is laying it thick in this one. It is pages and pages of the biggest clichés all wrapped into one with plot twists that are seen from miles away and not at all surprising. A bit of foreshadowing is always welcome, but in ‘Malibu Rising’, the author telephoned them all chapters before they were about to happen. It made me roll my eyes and at one point, I even thought this was a satire.

The author is also known for writing the stories of fictionalized characters that were meant to be inspired by the real life Hollywood people. This novel did not lack that at all. At the central party at Nina’s house, we are introduced to a myriad of characters, some of which I suppose are inspired by real life people from the 1980s. Although this was done as a way to build a world that Riva siblings were now in and emphasize their rise from the poverty stricken family, all it did for this reader was add unnecessary pages in the already pretty dull novel. Jenkins Reid added characters and told us their story only to toss them aside and never ever bring them up again. After a while I skimmed their stories as I simply did not care too much to know about the dozen of side characters that were not developed enough to be interesting on their own or added anything to the overall plot.

The ending was not less disappointing and felt very undeserved. All issues have been resolved with a magic wand like quality and I was left wondering what was the point of all of that. Most of the characters did move a bit and had some progress, but their stories were simply not interesting enough to me to truly care about anything they had to say or how they felt. The writing style was too simplistic and full of clichés, the world unbelievable. Perhaps Taylor Jenkins Reid simply is not the author for me and I don’t think that I will be reading anything further by her.

I rated this one ⅖.