July Book Review: Malibu Rising, the Perfect Beach Read
For our July Book review, bookstagrammer Bianka talked to us about Malibu Rising, between strong female characters, a beach party and the old Hollywood atmosphere.
“Reading for me is an absolute escape from everyday life. Whenever I feel overly anxious or feel like I am too much in my own head, I just sit down to read a book and it absolutely centers me and recharges me. In a way, reading has become my coping mechanism over the years and it has helped me through so many tough situations in life”.
Creating a community
Growing up, Bianka rather disliked reading. Up until the age of 12, when she started reaching for books more and more until it turned into a full-on obsession. “This was around the time I read the first books in the young adult genre and it has been the genre I read most of until this day”.
Bianka is a book reviewer/Instagrammer from Budapest, Hungary. She studied international relations and global studies. It’s during those university years that she realized how important it is to have proper representation in literature. “It is where I have encountered feminism in a positive light for the first time and realized how important it is and how much work there actually is to be done in this area”.
She started blogging years ago, to share her love and enthusiasm about the books she was reading, to try and create a community around it. The Instagram account came as a place to show the blog. “I discovered this amazing community and also fell in love with the whole aesthetic of it, eventually I decided to close my blog and post only on Instagram”.
She writes book reviews to vent about her excitement (or anger) upon finishing a book. But she also writes to interact with more people who went through the same emotions or spark a discussion about the story from another person’s perspective. “Sometimes my review posts turn into a sort of mini book club and I love it”.
Bianka loves how reading can bring random people from all over the world together, even if not directly. Talking about reading and books online has brought amazing people into her life, and she created this community, making reading a “thousand times more awesome”.
All-time favorites
As for reading in itself, for Bianka, it is calming, centering, relaxing. “Not only is it a way to calm my mind, I absolutely love how I get to experience different fictional worlds or futures through the books I read. I love how each character I read about teaches me something or how their actions, even though they are not relevant in my world, can spark an interesting thought or give me inspiration for everyday things”.
Among her favorite books are Catching Fire, the second book in the Hunger Games, forever a favorite, “because that was the book where I truly fell in love with reading dystopian novels”. There’s the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, as an important part of her early teens, but also because she remembers “how awesome it was to have a girl finally be the smart one out of the other characters instead of being the one who always needed to be saved. Reading about a smart, badass female character at the time was very influential to me”.
And Daisy Jones and the Six, for it’s “portraying female characters who all have flaws but they are strong in their own way and you cannot NOT root for them along the way even if you don’t agree with their choices”.
Malibu Rising: Family and Choices
For our July book review, Bianka decided to go with Malibu Rising, by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
She discovered the author with Daisy Jones and the Six. “While reading her books I always experience a full spectrum of emotions. The characters she writes about are not always flawless or likable, yet she has a way to make me want to root for these characters and want them to be happy”. So when she heard a new book by the author was coming out, she didn’t hesitate.
Malibu Rising follows these four famous siblings: Nina, Jay, Hud and Kit, who throw this party in Malibu each year at the end of summer. A party where everyone wants to be at, and everyone who is someone in Hollywood is. “While the main plotline of the book focuses on the party and the day of it in 1983, the book also tells the story of this family all the way back from how their parents met and how their love story unfolded”.
For Bianka, the main theme of the book is family. She loved “how tight the bond between these four siblings was: they have been through many obstacles and tragic events which could have easily made them weaker but they learned how to stick together and be a strong family unit on their own”.
It developed in family patterns, how parents can influence their children’s decisions later in life. “Whether anyone really has a choice in not making the same mistakes their parents made before or whether it is inevitable to make them again and again”.
Strength in the details
Bianka went from smiling from ear to ear and to crying her eyes out over the pages. “The author does a really great job of immersing the reader right into the story, and of making the reader feel like they have grown up with these characters and went through all of these life events alongside them”, she ponders.
For her, the book’s strength lies in the details. You feel like you have known every character your whole life. You even get to know the secondary characters, even though not as well, but it adds an extra layer.
She loved the pacing, the switch between the flashbacks and the present day. “ I could not stop reading”.
The only thing she found missing when reading the book was the ending, somehow. The prologue of the book has the quote ”because it is Malibu’s nature to burn”. Based on that, Bianka was expecting a different outcome to the ending of the book. “I was just expecting this really traumatic event to happen but the blow never came”. She’s not disappointed per se, as the ending was satisfying and drama definitely happened, but she was expecting something with more impact.
Feminism through strong female characters
For Bianka, the main topics of the book are not necessarily feminists, but she loved how many strong and real female characters it has presented.
“In a way, it also portrays a women’s situation from 1956 up until 1983 where the party in the center of the story takes place”, she explains.
The mother of these four siblings, June, is an incredibly flawed character. “I was so angry at her for letting herself and her children down, but at the same time I felt for her. She felt real, strong and incredibly weak at the same time”.
There’s Nina, through whom we get a glimpse of the preconceptions and consequences of being a model in the 1970s and 1980s. “What I liked about her character is how she realized she has to stand up for herself eventually. She has the power to let go and break the cycle in a way. She realizes it is time to live for herself and for me that feels very powerful”.
And then there’s Kit. Who is also a strong character to look at, “because she isn’t afraid to unapologetically be herself and even when she makes a life-changing self-discovery, I don’t feel like that is going to stop her”.
Bianka would absolutely recommend the book. “For a perfect summer read, to anyone who likes historical fiction and to people obsessed with that old Hollywood atmosphere. I would also recommend it because the first thing I thought of after reading this book was how it felt like a warm hug and who doesn’t need that in their lives?!” she smiles.
“Malibu Rising has for sure made it to my favorites list of this year for now, even if not for the story necessarily, but because of the characters, mostly the Riva siblings. Out of them because of Nina. I related to her on another level. She is a caretaker, who wants to be there for her family and doesn’t know how to put her needs in front of the needs of the family. But she learns to let go and start living her own life which is something I need a constant reminder for myself”.
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