At the beginning of the week, I finished my second novel of the year. I had heard great things about Malibu Rising. It should have been a great match for me. I was familiar with the geography of the city by the sea. I am always a big fan of family dramas. I absolutely HATED this book!
Malibu Rising tells the story of the dysfunctional Rivas family. In many ways, it is actually a blending of two intertwined stories. In the 1950s and 1960s, you have the tragic love story of Mick and June. They seemed to be a match made in the Heaven. Then, Mick finds success and realizes he was not “meant to be” in a monogamous relationship. In the 1980s, we follow the lives of Mick’s four children — now grown — as they figure out how to deal with their feelings about their parents and how to navigate the uncertain waters they now find themselves in. On paper, this should have been the perfect book for me. I found myself constantly frustrated with Reid’s writing and her attempts to be literary by constantly shifting between the major plots.
The novel was not a complete bust. I found myself rooting for the four Rivas children. Nina, Jay, Hud, and Kit were beautifully rendered characters. If only the story had simply centered on their troubled relationships. However, the inclusion of so many minor characters as well as the previous generations of the Riva family made this book much weaker than it had to be.
I cannot tell you the number of times that I nearly put this book down, never to be finished. Somehow,I managed to plug away and make it to the end. When Mick meets his adult children and they are all forced to face their past failures, Reid’s skill as a writer finally came through. There might be hope for this author after all. I found a few paragraphs in the final few pages of the novel worthwhile and beautifully written.
June had given her children this box packed to the brim with her own experiences, her own treasures and heartbreaks. Her own guilts and pleasures, triumphs and losses, values and biases, duties and sorrows.
And Nina had been carrying around this box her whole life, feeling the full weight of it.
But it was not, Nina saw just then, her job to carry the full box. 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.
Malibu Rising, 357.
For what it’s worth, I give this novel a hard pass. I don’t think it is worth the effort. Maybe it wouldn’t be bad as an audio book if you needed a simple diversion and there were no other options available. But there ARE outstanding family dramas to dive into and enjoy immensely. Skip this flippant journey through the hills of Malibu and go for another family saga instead. You’ll be much happier that you did!
Reading for Me 
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