Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Malibu Rising is the latest pick for Jenna Bush Hager’s popular Today show book club.
“I felt like Malibu Rising was a compulsively fun read that anybody would want to throw in their beach bag,” Hager said. “I think after the year we’ve had, everybody is looking forward to summer and this book felt like the perfect kickoff.”
Reid’s novel, her first since the 2019 bestseller Daisy Jones and The Six, follows four siblings who throw a party that forces them to reckon with their troubled childhood with a famous, sometimes-absent father and an alcoholic mother. A reviewer for Kirkus called the book “a compulsively readable story about the bonds between family members and the power of breaking free.”
“I knew that I wanted the story to take place over 24 hours, and that I was going to divide it hour by hour so that you could go through this day with the family, but it wasn’t until I began to get into the hours that I kept thinking, well, we need to go back in time, you need to understand how we got to this place,” Reid told the Today show.
Hager launched the book club in 2019. Previous picks have included Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Patsy and Emma Straub’s All Adults Here.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
