‘Daisy Jones and The Six’ by Taylor Jenkins Reid – Book Review

Blurb from Goodreads

For a while, Daisy Jones & The Six were everywhere. Their albums were on every turntable, they sold out arenas from coast to coast, their sound defined an era. And then, on 12 July 1979, they split. Nobody ever knew why. Until now. They were lovers and friends and brothers and rivals. They couldn’t believe their luck, until it ran out. This is their story of the early days and the wild nights, but everyone remembers the truth differently. The only thing they all know for sure is that from the moment Daisy Jones walked barefoot onstage at the Whisky, their lives were irrevocably changed. Making music is never just about the music. And sometimes it can be hard to tell where the sound stops and the feelings begin.

My Review

Three stars??? I think.

I’m right in the middle with my rating of this. Everyone seems to either love this or hate it and I’m mostly ambivalent.

It took me nine or ten days to read this. I found it so easy to put down and never wanted to pick it back up again until I forced myself to this evening and then blew through the last 40ish percent of the book just so I could finish it and start something new.  

Pros

• The narrative as given to us in an interview format. Loved that. Made me feel like it was a VH1 Behind the Music special in book format. 
• The feeling of the music scene in the seventies really came alive and I could almost pretend that I was living my best Fleetwood Mac fangirl life…. Oh yeah. I read this PURELY because of the Fleetwood Mac vibes. I bloody love them. Best gig I ever went to was back in 2015 when the whole crew played an incredible extended set, no support act… Good times indeed. 
• The female characters. The complete lack of crap they gave and just owned who they were as women. 

Cons

• The male characters. I swear they felt interchangeable AF. I was surprised at about 3/4 way through the book to realise that there were two sets of brothers in the band…yup. That’s how utterly lacking in memorability those side characters were. Yes I get that rock bands are gonna always be about the lead singers because that’s just they way it goes but eh… This was just too sucky with character development. I need more. 
• The prose…okay this is more on me than the author because the simplified prose style made sense with the interview format but it was just so perfunctory IMO. 
• The interviewer / author of the piece…. *eye roll*
• Just toss off with that simpering cringe fest of an ending. Nope, no and no way. 
• And the song lyrics at the end of the book………….. Oh dear god no. Sometimes snippets are so much better. And letting things up to the reader’s imagination. Felt like I was being force fed Jenkins Reid’s interpretation of the music too much. The thing I love about music is that as listeners we don’t ever truly know what the songwriter/s was/were feeling when they wrote it. And so the song becomes deeply personal to the listener. So in this book giving song names and an odd snippet of a lyric throughout the book was great because I could let my own imagination conjure up the entire emotional picture that the songs were painting in my own head… I did not want to read the song lyrics at the end. Cheesy AF in my eyes. 

So there were good points and not so good points but as I have written this review and thought about how I feel about the book my ambivalence seems to have turned to negativity i.e. the cons seem to have outweighed the pros. The writing was definitely dull, plot line predictable and it made me not want to read for a week…

Two stars it is

But I can totally see this working as a TV mini series!

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