Malibu Rising

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 6

Part 1, Chapters 7-12

Part 2, Chapters 1-7

Part 2, Chapters 8-13

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The “Riva Lips”

The Riva siblings’ inheritance from their parents is a key theme in Malibu Rising, and the “Riva lips”—Mick’s “billowy bottom lip topped by [a] thinner upper lip” (12) is a symbol of this. Mick’s celebrity makes his lips an iconic trademark, so the fact that it recurs in his children’s faces cements their genetic connection to Mick. Everyone Mick fathers has the Riva lips: Nina and Hud identify Casey as a half-sibling because “Casey Greens did not look anything like Nina or Jay or Hud or Kit or Mic. Except for that lip” (237).

The Riva lips are the most tangible sign of Mick’s influence on the siblings’ lives. Just as ever-present as his inescapable fame, Mick’s lips make his children worry about what they have inherited from their absent father. Nina realizes that she took on responsibility that he refused to shoulder; Jay has a similar appetite for fame and women; and Hud has no other role model for how to be a father. However, the children realize that the parent they are much more closely connected to is June, whose love and devotion has kept them grounded and ultimately loyal to one another.

Riva’s Seafood

June’s parents own the restaurant Pacific Fish and expect her and her husband to take it over when they pass away. However, June wants nothing to do with it, and Mick promises "you won’t ever have to step another foot in that restaurant once you’re mine” (49). This becomes the first promise he breaks, and after he leaves the first time, June starts running the restaurant to make ends meet. The restaurant becomes an emblem of her anchor to Malibu and her hope that Mick will one day return: She renames it Riva’s Seafood because Mick’s growing fame “was going to bring in a lot more customers. It might even get her some press. But more important, when Mick finally came back, he was going to love it” (134).

After June’s death, Nina “take[s] her place, just as her mother and grandmother had before her, behind the register” (157). Income from Riva’s Seafood pays some of the bills, but it also keeps Nina tied to Malibu. At the beginning of the novel, she is determined not “to be the one, three generations in, to let Riva’s Seafood go to shit” (61). However, by the end, Nina realizes that her mother wouldn’t have wanted her to fall into the same pattern of only living for other people, so she lets the restaurant go, honoring what June had hoped for herself when she was young.

Animal Families

On three occasions in the novel, Nina watches a family of animals on the beach. The night of her mother’s funeral, she spots a family of seals. As she sits on the beach and wishes she could join the seals in the water, Nina realizes that she has “to model for her siblings what she wanted them to do for themselves. They would not be OK if she was not OK” (152). As a result, she insists that they all go surfing together the next morning, knowing that the beach is their refuge.

In 1979, Nina notices a family of dolphins and begins to cry. Something about the carefree grouping unlocks Nina’s grief and allows her to finally mourn her mother’s death and “every tiny thing” that she has had to deal with or give up as a result of her parents’ choices (169). This emotional catharsis renews her.

Finally, in the novel’s present, as Mick talks to his children about his childhood, Nina recognizes dolphins in the distance, taking comfort in the fact that dolphins “had been swimming along the shore in Malibu well before she was born and they would be swimming along the shore here in Malibu well after she left” (343). Their constant presence is a direct contrast to Mick’s inconsistent appearances in her life. Nina values presence and is proud of the loyalty of her siblings. The dolphins remind her that the beach is a sanctuary that will always be there for them.