Book Review: Daisy Jones & The Six

I’m just going to prepare you now – this will be a gushing review. I enjoyed The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo but wasn’t as enamored with it as everyone else seems to be, so my expectations for this one were a little tempered. However, Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid was a smash hit for me.

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. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.

The Good

• The Format – I loved how the story was written in interview format, switching dialogue between the characters quickly to cover all sides to the situations. I thought it played out so vividly, really giving you that feel of a documentary. Now I did listen to the full cast audiobook version of this book so I think that really added to the experience. It may not have made as much of an impact on me had I read the physical book.
• LISTEN TO THE AUDIOBOOK!!! – I just wanted to take a minute to absolutely rave about the audiobook version of this story. It’s a full cast featuring actresses Jennifer Beals and Judy Greer, as well as actors Benjamin Bratt and Pablo Schreiber. Trust me, you will not regret listening to it.
• Flawed Characters – It was refreshing to have characters that were all very distinct with their own personalities and quirks, while also being extremely flawed. You wouldn’t necessarily agree with any of the choices they would make, but each one seemed so realistic that you could somehow still relate and understand the reasoning behind it. Personally, I found the band members to be more likable than Daisy, who kept herself closed off during the interviews. I thought that was smart of Jenkins Reid to keep her at distance from the reader, reinforcing that “cool girl” factor even more.
• Take My Emotions…. – Seriously, that ending was so bittersweet that I teared up while listening to it at work.

The Bad

• Just A Little More? – I think the only flaw I could find with this book was that I would’ve been happier with just a bit more depth to the main romance in the story. I would’ve liked to have spent maybe 20-30 more pages of just focusing on the development of it between the characters. It happened a little fast and I think we missed more of an in depth look at how that started from each of their perspectives, when what we got seemed to focus more on the obvious aspects.

Honestly, I cannot recommend this book enough. I really think the audiobook version adds so much more to the overall experience of the story. The cast does a great job of bringing the emotion of the story to life. And the story itself is so engrossing that I didn’t want to put it down, I had to know what was going to happen next. I really felt as if I was a huge fan and finally getting to learn why they broke up. Jenkins Reid does such an amazing job of pulling you in and making you become so invested in the characters lives.

Final Verdict: 5/5 Stars

Have you read this book yet? If so, what did you think? Did you read the physical book or listen to audiobook like me? How did you feel about Daisy as a character?