Malibu Rising

Nina’s younger brother Jay is “slender and tall […] he looked like what he was: a championship surfer” (15). He has loved surfing since a day in children when the four siblings ran out onto the beach and found a surfboard. The sport has long been his escape, so Jay is terrified by a recent diagnosis of a heart condition that threatens to end his career early.

Like his father, Jay fears the loss of his celebrity status. Reeling from the medical crisis and still not fully over his breakup with Ashley, Jay seeks solace in a too-hasty romance only to be shocked when Lara doesn’t return his overly intense feelings. As he learns the truth about Hud and Ashley relationship and sees his potential to repeat his father’s destructive pattern of womanizing, Jay slowly learns to accept that it’s time for him to retire. He commits to using his knowledge of the surfing world to promote his sister Kit.

Kit Riva, the youngest of the four Riva children, is “slim and small and tightly built, all sinew and tanned sin […] She looked like a miniature version of her sister without any of the grace and ease. Beautiful but maybe a bit awkward. Awkward but maybe beautiful” (16). Kit has grown up in the shadow of her siblings: She wants to surf competitively but doesn’t think that she’ll get any attention since she isn’t as “gorgeous as Nina” (63), and since Jay doesn’t acknowledge her surfing talent. Kit feels restricted to Malibu, especially while “[h]er siblings were out there seeing the world while Kit was still slinging crab cakes” (63).

By the end of the novel, Kit comes into her own, growing into her style and accepting her sexuality. Her transformation starts when Nina helps to adjust Kit’s outfit, and continues as Kit kisses a boy for the first time only to realize that she’s more attracted to women. During the dramatic confrontation on the beach, a newly mature Kit nudges Nina to sell the restaurant and leave Malibu, knowing that she, Jay, Hud, and Casey can take care of themselves. 

Hud is “tall, stocky where they were lithe, who spent the summer getting sunburned as they grew bronze, was the smartest one of the bunch” (20). His is Mick’s son, but Carol Hudson is his mother, the result of an affair unbeknownst to June until Carol appears at her door to give her Hud. June immediately takes Hudson in, and his siblings treat him as though there is no difference. However, Hud takes a backseat to Jay and his fame in many instances. He and Jay have a symbiotic working relationship, with Jay surfing and Hud taking pictures of him.

Hud is gentle, often sitting back to think about Nina and wishing that she would be more selfish. He is also in love with Ashley, Jay’s ex-girlfriend. Early in the novel, he thinks about what the effects his parents—Mick, Carol, and June—will have on his life. Not really knowing Mick or Carol, this scares him as he thinks “[o]ur parents live inside us, whether they stick around or not” (130). He is sure that there are traits that he got from both and worries that he will be the same type of father that Mick is: absent.

However, Hud’s kindness and love make it easy for him to tell Ashley that he will be there for their child, but the events leading up to and during the party of the day make Hud nervous, knowing that Jay will not be happy. He is so nervous that at first he adjusts the truth, asking Jay if it would be alright if Hud asked Ashley out. When Jay says no, Hud panics, terrified of losing his brother. However, they come together at the end, thinking that they can now help Kit have a successful career.

Filled with hope for a more glamorous future, Nina’s mother June doesn’t wish to inherit her parents’ restaurant. After Mick whisks her off of her feet, June decides that “she could never go back to who she was even a moment ago, now that she knew what he could do to her” (50). But because of her enduring love for Mick, when he proves a disappointment, June remains stuck on him through his many betrayals. When he first leaves, June thinks “I will be more than just this […] I am more than just a woman he left” (91). However, she cannot move on. Instead, she slips into depression, which she self-medicates with alcohol. More and more, her inability to function means Nina has to take on the responsibility of parenting her younger siblings and eventually, running the restaurant.

Still, June’s flaws are tempered by her unyielding and devoted love for her children. They grow up in awe of the way she simply chose to take in and love Mick’s son Hud and the way she kept them a united family while encouraging their love of surfing. After June dies, her children pick up where she left off, doing their best despite the absence of their father and the difficult hand that they have been dealt. In the end, Nina, the one who most resembles June in her caregiver temperament, moves beyond being an echo of her mother’s past, leaving both the restaurant and Malibu so that she can live a life for herself.

The identity of the arsonist who sets fire to Nina’s home is a mystery from the beginning, and, at first, the novel seems to stage this as its central question. Just as this figure casts a shadow over the novel’s plot, so too does absent father Mick’s “shadow excelled at haunting each one of his children” (17). Mick is the arsonist—the person whom the novel’s prologue accuses of always destroying things and walking away.

Even in middle age, Mick still contends with his parents’ effect on his life. Orphaned by 18, he was always drawn to attention and wealth, two things that he’d never had as a child. As a result of this desire, he abandoned his family. Despite telling “himself he was nothing like his own father. His own father who would come home smelling like other women’s perfume, his own father who would leave for weeks at a time” (88), Mick turns into exactly the same kind of womanizer as soon as his singing career takes off. The fact that June is always willing to take him back gives Mick the self-delusion that he always “had meant to be a good man” (82).

Mick’s desire to take the easy way out continues through the end of the novel, as he decides that leaving his kids alone is a redemptive act—a cowardly retreat from having to face his failures as a father and man.