Thoughts on : Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Genre : Fiction
Stand alone
About the Book :
Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.
Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.
Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.
Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.
The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies.
My Thoughts :
I recently posted about some of my favorite books read last summer, and among them was, of course, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. This book received a lot of praise, which I agreed with, and like many others I was really eager to read Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new book.
Sadly, I can’t say that Daisy Jones & The Six quite lived up to my expectations. I usually love stories told through different narrative devices and formats; here, I found the format to be an obstacle to my enjoyment of the story. The interviews and the way they were all talking over each other made it so that I was never able to really connect with the characters or experience their life with them. I felt constantly disconnected and, quite frankly, bored for most of it. I also don’t usually enjoy the “drugs and rock & roll” scene, which is probably another reason why I wasn’t captivated by the story.
I liked where it ended though and it was also a quick read. And the characters and their relationships were interesting, which is probably part of what kept me reading.
I’ll still want to read more from the author, because Evelyn Hugo was truly fabulous; I’m just sad that I found none of the magic from this favorite in this new book. I wonder whether I would have enjoyed the format more as an audiobook?
The audio production is fantastic but it didn’t save the book for me. Like you, I thought this book was just okay. I didn’t think the characters were developed all that well and there wasn’t that much plot.