Daisy Jones & the Six

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.

This was a book that I had heard a lot about before I read it, and while people seemed to really like it, I wasn’t sure that I was all that interested in reading it. I’ve enjoyed some other books by Taylor Jenkins Reid, but for some reason this wasn’t one that appealed to me all that much.

It was picked by my book club for our May book though, so I figured I would read it and see what everyone was loving about it. I borrowed it from someone and planned to read it over the Easter long weekend.

I’m torn, because on the one hand, this was an absorbing book. The interview format made it a quick, easy read, and I finished it in about a day and a half. On the other hand, I feel like the interview format made it hard for me to really feel invested in the characters. It was an interesting way to tell a story, and I enjoyed seeing the way people remembered events differently, and reading between the lines was kind of fun. But I don’t think I got totally used to that format, and it was a bit frustrating for me.

I’m torn between a 3.5 star and 4 star rating for this one. What’s holding me back from rating it higher is that while I recognize that the characters were recounting some devastating events, I didn’t feel like I was pulled in or emotionally invested. This was definitely an interesting, quick read, but I didn’t have any deeper attachment to it.