MALIBU RISING by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The author hits a sweet spot in this novel, that beating heart of change that is plot and the protagonist’s deep epiphany. The Riva children, offspring of a neer do well-famous father and a caring but tormented mother, rise to various levels of fame in their own right: Jay as the star surfer, Hud as a photographer, and Nina as the poster girl and model for California surfer girl. The youngest, Kit, looks up to her siblings while forging her own desires. The story revs up to Nina's annual end-of-summer Riva party at her cliffside Malibu home. Things get out of hand. Secrets are exposed. The long-absent father shows up. Chaos ensues until the whole coastline of Malibu is in flames. Everyone changes on the fateful night.  

Favorite line(s): In that moment, Nina was not mad or jealous or embarrassed or anything else she might have expected. Nina was sad. Sad that she’d never lived a fraction of a second life like Carrie Soto. What a world she must live in, Nina thought, where you can piss and moan and stomp your feet and cry in public and yell at the people who hurt you. That you can dictate what you will and will not accept. Nina, her entire life, had been programmed to accept. Accept that your father left. Accept that your mother is gone. Accept that you must take care of your siblings. Accept that the world wants to lust after you. Accept accept accept. For so long, Nina had believed it was her greatest strength—that she could withstand, that she could endure, that she would accept it all and keep going. It was so foreign to her the idea of declaring that something was unacceptable.

THE GUEST by Emma Cline

Cline is a sublime writer. Minimalist but sensory. Evocative but short on words. There’s no backstory wounds to understand the protagonist better. What’s present on the page is all you get. And it’s enough—and more so. Alex, the twenty-something Hamptons drifter, spends the week as an uninvited guest moving from one place to another, determined to make peace with the wealthy older man who kicked her out days earlier. A take on John Cheever’s short story, The Swimmer. Cline’s writing reminds me of 1980s Ann Beattie or a contemporary Ernest Hemingway but for women. Stripped down to the juicy parts only. 

Favorite line(s): Simon snapped the radio off. Music didn’t seem to give him any pleasure—Alex liked that he didn’t pretend otherwise. Younger men had to make everything mean something, had to turn every choice and preference into a referendum on their personality. They had made her uneasy, the men she’d seen who’d been closer to her own age. The possibility of exposure was too great. Much better to have the buffer of an entirely different generation: the older men had no context for Alex, couldn’t even begin to inadvertently piece together any semblance of her real self.

(I’ve been doing a lot of long drives lately!!!)

SUCH A FUN AGE by Kiley Reid (AUDIO VERSION)

The novel opens with twenty-something Emira Tucker confronted by a security guard in a bougie grocery store. It is late in the evening, and Emira is babysitting three-year-old Briar. They are dancing in the store's aisle when a white woman (Emira is black, Briar white) suspects the toddler might have been kidnapped. The incident between the parties is recorded on a cell phone. This launches a story of class assumptions, prejudice, privilege, ambition, and false narratives between these richly drawn characters. In addition to Emira are Alix, her employer, Briar’s mom, and the man they both share history with, Kelly, who was the man who filmed the grocery store fiasco. Its layers of intertwined power struggles give the novel a gripping plot line that comes to a satisfying conclusion.

THE CELEBRANTS by Steven Rowley (AUDIO VERSION)

Marielle, Naomi, Craig, Alec, the Jordans—Jordan and Jordy meet at Berkeley in the 1990s and become close friends. Alec dies of a drug overdose as they all prepare to graduate. After his funeral, the friends decide to make a pact. Anyone can call the others to celebrate their funerals while still alive to know how loved, how valued, and how important they are to each other. It’s the Big Chill for Gen Xers. The audio reading was slightly over the top, but I loved the story. This is one of the original wonders of humankind no one exercises: to tell people what they mean to you in the moment. If everyone made a habit of this, there would be fewer mental health problems—so says me. I’ve seen the joy this practice elicits in my own world. Try it.

THE MAID by Nita Prose (AUDIO VERSION)

Molly Gray (yes, the joke Molly Maid gets its due) is a maid at a swanky luxury hotel. A hard worker, Molly relishes the everyday consistency of her job—the pressed uniform that awaits her in a locker, the well-stocked housekeeping cart, the usual twenty rooms to clean during her shift. One day while cleaning, Molly discovers Mr. Black “dead in his bed.” On the autism spectrum and still grieving from the loss of her grandmother, Molly becomes a suspect in the murder. Trusting to a fault, she’s the bait to a cast of characters, from Mr. Black’s girlfriend to the hotel’s bartender, that use her to their advantage. It’s a cozy whodunit with Molly as the story’s hero.