Spoiler-Free Review

I want to start by saying I loved both Daisy Jones & The Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. But Malibu Rising just fell flat for me in several ways, which was really disappointing.

What’s Malibu Rising about?

This story follows the four Riva siblings over the day leading up to an infamous party that will result in a wildfire.

This one just felt phoned in.

This is not a long book, and yet it took me a month to finish – and ultimately, I had to finish it on audio. While the beginning intrigued me, my interest slowly waned. I had issues with several components: the prose, the unnecessary amount of backstory and side character vignettes, and the lack of plot. Let’s take it point by point.

First, the prose. It often felt poorly written – the sentence structure was extremely repetitive, and in several places there would be multiple sentences strung together starting with the exact same pronoun. Here’s an example: “She left her hair damp and dripping slightly down her back. She grabbed her silver watch and put it on, noticing that it would be 10:00 soon. She was meeting her brothers and sister for lunch at the restaurant at noon.” That happened a lot in this book. That may not bother everybody, but it’s a big pet peeve for me.

On top of that, there were so many dialogue tags. During almost every conversation, even the conversations between just two people (where you couldn’t lose track of who was talking), every line ended with, “she said” or “he said.” Even on audio, that got old.

Second, the sheer amount of backstory. During the first half of the book, every chapter was capped with a flashback scene about the Rivas’ parents and their love story, which I honestly just didn’t care much about. I think a few chapters of this might have been fine, but it was so much of the book. Perhaps it was that I just found both of the Riva parents to be kind of pathetic and uninteresting, and I wanted to get back to the present.

In the second half, it seemed like so many random side characters at the party got a few pages each – and they weren’t even relevant to the story. Many of them never got brought up again, so what was the point? Why did I need to read about this random screenwriter hook up with a waitress and what it meant to each of them? Why did I need to read about a woman starting a threesome with rockstars as one last hurrah before giving up acting and returning home to settle down? I did not care. All of these little vignettes felt like filler.

The result of all this was twofold: 1) it created an overly explanatory writing style, and 2) it felt like we spent more time in the past than the present moment of the story. It also meant there wasn’t really a plot to latch onto. This was extremely character-driven, with the feeling that it more a snapshot of these characters’ lives than a defined plot arc. That’s not always a bad thing, but it didn’t work for me in this story.

Half the time I spent on this book, I felt like I was reading something that didn’t even matter.

Should you read Malibu Rising?

If you’re really into character-driven stories and don’t mind that it’s lacking a plot, you might like this one. This might also be for you if you enjoy books with unique timelines – in this case, the entire book (except for the backstory parts) takes place over the course of one day.

If prose and plot are important to you, I might recommend skipping this one. Some character-driven stories I did actually really like were A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles and Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau.