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Review

Every year, on the last Saturday of August, the Riva siblings throw a party. By 1983—the year Taylor Jenkins Reid straps her novel to a countdown clock and lets it burn—the party has become a Malibu institution, a surf-and-celebrity bacchanal where movie stars rub shoulders with line cooks and the Pacific air hums with possibility. By dawn, the house is ash. The fire, we learn in a prologue that traces the region’s fire-cycle back to 500 B.C.E., began because “it was in one particular person’s nature to set fire and walk away.” That person is Mick Riva, the world-famous singer who abandoned his four children, and the blaze is as much metaphor as plot point: inherited damage, Reid argues, is something you can watch smolder for decades, then watch it torch everything if you don’t decide what to carry forward and what to let burn.

Malibu Rising is a novel constructed around a thesis it wants to state, dramatise, and finally resolve. In its opening historical chapter, Reid lays out the claim with the clarity of a mission statement: “Our family histories are simply stories. They are myths we create about the people who came before us, in order to make sense of ourselves.” To the eldest, Nina, the story of their parents’ marriage is a tragedy; to Jay, a comedy of errors; to Hud, an origin story; to the youngest, Kit, a mystery. To June, their mother, it was “always and forever, a romance.” The novel then spends four hundred pages proving that each sibling reads the same events incompatibly, that the myth is constructed from the inside, and that true maturity means sorting through the “box” of what your parents handed you, deciding what to keep and what to put down. That is not a complicated thesis. The novel’s real interest—and its considerable achievement—lies in the friction between the thesis and the lived texture of the Rivas’ night, which is messier, more contradictory, and more emotionally honest than any tidy parable about chosen family.

The structure Reid employs is a dual timeline, alternating between a real-time, hour-by-hour account of the party on August 27, 1983, and flashback chapters organised by year: 1956, 1959, 1961, 1962, 1969, 1971, 1975, 1978/1981. The effect is formally intelligent: each present-moment crisis is shadowed by the family history that produced it, so that the party never feels like a self-contained spectacle but like a pressure cooker the past has been heating for a generation. June Costas, at seventeen, meets the aspiring crooner Mick Riva on a beach and describes her dream life: “Two kids. A boy and a girl. A good husband, who likes to dance with me in the living room … Not in the hills or in the city but on the water. Directly on the beach. With two sinks in the bathroom.” The specificity of the two sinks—a detail so modest it aches—becomes a motif for the domestic security June never secures. Mick rises, cheats, leaves, returns on his knees, and leaves again, a cycle Reid renders with the compressed, fable-like quality of a family legend. When a starlet named Carol Hudson deposits Mick’s illegitimate infant on June’s doorstep, June locks Mick out and tells the baby, “I will love you.” That Hud grows up as fully Riva as his biological siblings, while the biological father who shares his blood becomes a stranger, is the book’s simplest and strongest argument that family is constituted by presence, not paternity.

The present-day party, by contrast, unfolds as a sprawling ensemble piece. Reid rotates point-of-view through all four Rivas and a dozen party guests—models, surfers, a television star, a barista, a mysterious seventeen-year-old named Casey Greens who may be a secret Riva—each of whom refracts the family mythology from an angle the others cannot see. The technique is borrowed from the multi-strand realist novel, and it works best when it makes you feel the centrifugal force of a party that has slipped its tethers. Teen idol Tuesday Hendricks hides from a man she humiliated the night before. Ted Travis, a self-destructive TV actor, meets a grieving widow and finds a flicker of recognition. Vaughn Donovan, a movie star, gets drunk, smashes Nina’s wedding china, urinates on a Roy Lichtenstein, and is arrested. These vignettes are diverting, and they earn their keep thematically: everyone at this party, Reid insists, is living inside a private story, and the Rivas are merely the ones whose stories have calcified into public lore.

The problem is that the party also functions as a delivery system for emotional climaxes and ideological points, and the machinery shows. Over the course of a few hours, Nina’s best friend Tarine diagnoses her with devastating precision: “I suspect you have not lived a single day for yourself.” Kit kisses a boy in the outdoor shower and realises she is a lesbian, a discovery that feels both true to her character and a little too neatly slotted into the night’s schedule of revelations. Hud’s secret affair with Jay’s pregnant ex-girlfriend Ashley detonates, Jay beats Hud bloody on the lawn, and Jay resolves, before the hour is out, not to be like his father—a decision that is moving but resolves with a speed that flattens the genuine rage the novel has been building. Reid is writing commercial fiction that prizes momentum and emotional clarity, and those are real virtues. But there are moments when the clarity becomes a kind of authorial tidying, a smoothing of the very friction the structure is designed to generate.

When Mick himself arrives uninvited, Reid’s control tightens. The patriarch who failed to recognise his own daughter Kit—he compliments her, charmingly, without knowing who she is—has come rehearsing apologies. His argument is simple: he was never “capable” of being a father. It is Nina, at the book’s most riveting stretch, who dismantles him. Her speech on the beach is the novel’s thesis delivered as direct address, and it lands with the force of a withheld flood:

Capable is a question I never had the luxury of asking. Because my family needed me. And unlike you, I understand how important that is.

She enumerates everything she and June did without feeling capable: raising siblings, dropping out of school, scraping money for the right birthday cake. And then she tells him: “You are fucking nothing.” The line shocks her siblings. It also shocks the reader, because until this moment Nina has been the family’s human doormat, absorbing every betrayal, signing her own body on posters while wishing “to be invisible for five minutes.” Her fury here is earned, and it reorients the novel’s moral compass away from forgiveness and toward a harder truth: that love sincerely felt but never acted upon does not count.

Yet Reid immediately complicates the rejection. Mick, broken open, confesses that his own parents died in a fire when he was eighteen—a fire, it is implied, his mother set. “Even when he failed, he won, didn’t he?” Kit thinks, watching him after he fails to recognise her but still radiates charisma. The novel does not excuse him. It refuses his bid for reconciliation. But it grants him genuine pathos, recasting his neglect as transmitted trauma he could not or would not interrupt. The fire that killed his parents rhymes with the fire his discarded cigarette will ignite hours later: a structural mirroring that closes a generational loop without softening the judgment. This is where Reid is most sophisticated—holding two truths at once, letting Mick be both a victim and an agent of harm, letting the siblings absorb his sorrow without owing him reinstatement. The hug he gives each child before walking away is not a redemption; it is a farewell.

The fire, when it comes, is both destruction and renewal—a clearing that finally lets Nina release everything she inherited. Her husband Brandon, the tennis star who publicly proposed reconciliation earlier in the evening, is sent away with his mistress Carrie Soto after a lawn confrontation that leaves Nina “one hundred times lighter.” The cliffside glass-and-concrete house—bought by Brandon, a gilded cage—burns. The family restaurant, Riva’s Seafood, the three-generation obligation June never wanted and Nina has shouldered alone, is symbolically surrendered. Nina drives away in Casey’s red pickup truck, heading for Madeira, Portugal, and reads about the fire mid-flight, holding it as both calamity and liberation. The novel’s final metaphor crystallises in her thoughts:

Her job was to sort through the box. To decide what to keep, and to put the rest down. She had to choose what, of the things she inherited from the people who came before her, she wanted to bring forward. And what, of the past, she wanted to leave behind.

It is a resonant image, and it does the work of converting an abstraction about legacies into a single, decisive action—letting go of the restaurant, the marriage, the house. But the metaphor also reveals the novel’s preference for resolution over ambiguity. Nina’s escape is framed as liberation, unambiguously, and the siblings not only let her go but orchestrate her disappearance, covering for her while insisting they no longer need her. That the youngest, Kit, becomes the generative voice telling Nina there is “room for both” Nina to leave and Casey to stay is a lovely unfolding. Yet the book never fully interrogates whether Nina’s flight from caregiving is also an abandonment in its own right—a disappearance that echoes Mick’s, even if its motive and consequence are entirely different. The novel comes close to asking whether breaking from family is liberation or repetition, but it swerves, choosing to celebrate Nina’s lightness rather than weigh its cost.

This reluctance to sit in unresolved tension is by design. Malibu Rising belongs to the multigenerational family saga tradition, an inheritance from the realist domestic novel, and it wears its psychoanalytic and existentialist influences openly: the question of whether character is fate or choice is debated across every sibling’s arc, literalised in Jay’s hereditary dilated cardiomyopathy—a heart condition “given to him by all of the people who came before him.” It is also a feminist novel, drawing on mid-century domestic critique and chosen-family discourse. June’s self-annihilating devotion to Mick, her slide into a beautiful-faced alcoholism, and her drowning in the bathtub while her children are away are the cautionary template Nina fears repeating. Against that template, Reid arrays a series of counter-women: Carrie Soto, the tennis champion who refuses to be a secret; Tarine, who diagnoses Nina’s self-erasure and accepts a proposal on her own terms; Kit, who discovers a self “she could never really see in anyone yet” and comes out with a quiet, steady courage. The novel’s feminism is earnest and well-intentioned, and at its best—as in the scene where the narrator notes that the police only “knocked” at this Malibu mansion, because in Compton or Inglewood “they would have walked right in”—it pierces the party’s bubble and names the wealth and whiteness underwriting the whole bacchanal. But the critique is glancing, subordinated to the emotional arcs, and the police brutality scene in which Sergeant Purdy assaults Tarine is resolved by morning with the wealthy partygoers’ agents springing them from jail. The class observation lands but does not linger; the novel is too enamored of the spectacle it critiques to truly sit with its consequences.

The book’s pop-cultural cross-references ground it in a specific, pleasurable texture: Prince’s “1999” plays and something breaks open in Nina; Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” scores Ashley’s drive away from the wreckage; a child actor from Family Ties croons Blondie from a fallen chandelier. Reid, who credits a surfing consultant and drew on the research for Daisy Jones & the Six, knows how to make a cultural moment feel lived-in rather than pasted-on. The surf sequences, brief but precise, anchor the Riva siblings in a physical practice that binds them when everything else dissolves: their discovery of an abandoned board on a 1969 beach day is the origin of the only inheritance that does not hurt them. This is a novel that understands Malibu not merely as a glamorous backdrop but as a place with its own geology of destruction and renewal, a region “that yearns to burn,” and the fire-cycle metaphor is woven through the book with genuine craft.

What, then, does Malibu Rising finally do? It is a propulsive, emotionally intelligent family saga that builds its architecture carefully, delivers its climaxes with force, and leaves its reader with a moving image of a woman driving away from a burning house, choosing life. It is also a novel whose ideological clarity sometimes outruns its willingness to dwell in the mess it has so carefully assembled. The cast is large, the resolutions come quickly, and the tidiness of the morning-after—Jay reveals his cardiomyopathy to Hud, Hud proposes to Ashley, Kit comes out, Casey is welcomed, everyone covers for Nina—reads like an epilogue that is eager to reassure. The book’s real power lies in the moments when it resists that reassurance: in Nina’s fury, in the unsentimental judgment of Mick, in the image of June “crumpled down onto the driveway, heavy and dead, like an anchor tied to nothing,” a phrase Reid repeats to describe Nina years later, insisting that the pattern is real even if the children can, with effort, break it. That tension—between determinism and choice, between the stories we inherit and the ones we write—is what gives the novel its heat. Reid does not fully resolve it, because she cannot, but the best passages know that and do not try. For readers who want a family story that moves like a riptide and leaves the taste of salt and smoke, the book delivers. It knows that even when a house burns to the ground, what matters is who walks out and what they carry.