In 1980s Malibu, the universally adored children of superstar singer Mick Riva are preparing for their annual end-of-summer party. Alluring Nina, charismatic Jay, charming Hud, and sassy Kit go through the motions of preparing to manage a wild houseful of actors, models, and executives alike, yet their minds are elsewhere: wrapped up in the lies they’ve told and the facades they’ve maintained to cope with their family’s tortured history. As the gathering of the year kicks off at Nina’s beach house, a central question arises: will the Riva siblings’ strong track record of overcoming unthinkable difficulties together be enough to save them from the isolating secrets they’ve been keeping from each other?
Throughout most of the novel, Jenkins Reid’s writing floats like a smooth tidal wave between the tense events of the present and the family past that laid the foundations for the Riva siblings’ circumstances today. As readers pick apart the siblings’ insecurities, they are periodically transported to a subplot decades in the past, when soft-hearted June falls spontaneously in love with Mick Riva and condemns herself and her future children to a strained future of infidelity.
Jenkins Reid outlines the ways in which trauma manifests across multiple generations, hopelessly entrapping its victims no matter how fervently they struggle to alter their circumstances. Mick Riva, a victim of a tumultuous domestic environment, proceeds to inflict the same harm on his own wife and children that his own parents inflicted on him; his children, in turn, carry ugly burdens that stem directly from his poor parenting capabilities. As an adult, Nina finds herself in her mother’s shoes as her own husband abandons her, while her younger brothers and sister struggle to untangle the fraying threads of their own romantic endeavors and insecurities.
The Riva siblings have been irrevocably sculpted by the parents who bore them. Nina sacrifices her own happiness because she spent her adolescence pulling her siblings out of the gaping hole left by their father’s departure and their mother’s death. Jay desperately maintains the pride and bravado that he thinks he inherited from his father. Hud, aching for independence from a family that has always overshadowed him, sneaks behind his brother’s back with an old romantic partner. Lastly, Kit gazes into the mirror and can’t see a budding “spark” or purpose anywhere. The cross-generational set of behavioral patterns that emerges within the characters is one of the novel’s key strengths. Additionally, Jenkins Reid masterfully incorporates multiple points of view within time frames that are both narrow (the day of the party, 1983) and vast (the years stemming from 1956, when June and Mick met).
Despite the novel’s positive attributes I articulated above, I felt that the main characters lacked enough substance for their hardships to truly resonate with me. I registered via the novel’s flashbacks that the Riva siblings’ interpretations of the past are bleeding into the present, but their interactions read more like a soap opera than a deep exploration of fragile family relationships. In fact, I found the vain, bitter, and impulsive stars who descend hawkishly upon the party (introduced sarcastically by Jenkins Reid in brief chapters) to be even more relatable than the main characters themselves. Additionally, I was unmoved by the sudden reappearance of Mick Riva and his climactic “heart-to-heart” with his children. While I understand that he had to return in order to complete the Rivas’ character arcs and neatly tie up the storyline, I would have preferred to read a novel that left him in the same place where he started—out of his children’s lives. My opinion is that Jenkins Reid could have crafted more complex characters out of the Riva siblings with a father who remains ever-absent, yet simultaneously ever-present because of his stardom.
I do have my criticisms, but Malibu Rising is a combined historical fiction novel and family drama that entertainingly captures brutal realities we all want to hear more about: ruptures taking place within famous families and the scorching conflicts lurking beneath the plastic perfection of Hollywood. With two primary storylines and a single family history unfolding on the beaches of one of America’s most famous West Coast destinations, simmering tensions and untold truths burst through the picture-perfect ocean surface.
