Reviews tagging 'Sexual content'

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

379 reviews

emotional inspiring lighthearted reflective relaxing sad fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

perfect, simply perfect. the Rivas siblings are the easiest to love

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emotional reflective medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

men are terrible lol.
i most enjoyed the plots concerning the core four siblings and, later, their plus-one. you'd think they be the majority of the plot, but there are a lot of subplots that have little-to-no bearing on the main storyline, and i understand wanting to make this gigantic party with all these interesting people feel more alive, but after a while i stopped caring and just wanted to skip to the Rivas. it was overall pretty good though
book cover discussion: the British one is so much better than that of the United States, like the pretty sunset/fire (đź‘€) colors, the serif font. unfortunately it doesn't carry over perfectly to the square aspect ratio for the audiobook.

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emotional reflective medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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emotional reflective medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I have mixed feelings about this one. I loved diving into this world and the lives of the characters, who all felt so real. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s writing style is so attentive to the minutiae of everyday life and also the incommunicable parts of Big Feelings.
But the ending to me felt contrived, almost too saccharine. I found it hard to believe that SO many plot lines would all be resolved in one night. I wanted things to be more open-ended than they were.
I also started getting confused by the sheer number of characters toward the end. But I loved the core family members—especially Kit—and would have been happy just to live in a world with them where nothing really happened. 

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emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

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adventurous emotional inspiring sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted reflective sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Do I care about surfing? Nope (although I wouldn't have minded a few more surfing scenes tbh). Do I care about rich and famous people throwing wild parties full of sex, drugs and alcohol? Nooooo. Am I interested in reading about cheating husbands and struggles of being a parent/ raising children? Hell no!!!! 
But when Taylor Jenkins Reid writes it, I will apparently still enjoy it. A lot. Her characters are some of the best fleshed out characters I've ever read. Her writing is super immersive. I swear, for 2 days I was part of this family. I was happy with them, sad with them. I laughed and cried with them. All of her characters just feel like real people and once the book is over, it's hard to comprehend that you just left a fictional group of people and need to return to the real world. 
Warning, though, the subtitle of this book should be: The AUDACITY of shitty men! 
I have never rolled my eyes SO much in my life. The things these men did and the way they reacted to those things and what they expected afterwords. I'm speechless. I get this is intentionally over the top... but truly, it reads pretty accurate. 
The women, though: Take my heart, I adore you. Nina is an angel and she deserves the world. Nina's best friend? Marry me, please? Kit is amazing! Can we get a sequel focusing on her? That tennis player? SLAY GIRL!
Although I think the small party episodes were entertaining and great for the atmosphere, there were just too many side characters and names being thrown around. By the end of the party, I was super confused. But then again... that's probably how you feel after these kinds of parties. 
And I'm a little confused about the role of the fire in the story. The marketing and how people talked about it made me believe it would play a bigger part in the plot. So my expectations were off, and I think this also contributed to me missing something in the end. 

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

not gonna lie, i really anticipated reading this book after loving all the other books by tjr I've read so far, but i didn't like this one. it took me way too long to get into it, i hated the dual timeline (although i understand the necessity of it) but it was just so annoying to me to have long chapters from years ago and then two pages from the day the story actually was (or should've been) about. the incredible amount of side characters and side stories was confusing and, in my opinion, not important to the story itself. i really wanted to like this book but i sadly didn't enjoy it which i am super disappointed about. 

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