REVIEW: Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I've yet to read a book by Taylor Jenkins Reid that doesn't completely capture and hold my attention so when I had a chance to sit down and read Daisy Jones & The Six I was hoping for the same reading experience. SPOILER ALERT: This reading experience was awesome. I sat down with this novel at the beginning of my weekend and let it steal hours away from my non-reading life so that I could read it.

I'm going to be honest with you, as always dear reader, and tell you that this isn't your typical contemporary romance or even general fiction work--though if you've read any of TJR's other works, you know that she doesn't write the typical. This particular novel is written like an interview so you get to know the characters and their stories through a question and answer format. You won't find exposition and the usual story arc but instead what you'll find is that you're picturing these characters and trying to match them up with a band that you're familiar with. I won't tell you which famous band I pictured but I'll tell you that the image I had was strong and it enhanced the way I visualized all of this going down.

So while this isn't really a traditional read, it was completely fascinating. I found myself really loving and rooting for some characters, exasperated with others, and completely amused by all of them at one time or another. I enjoyed feeling like I was a fly on the wall as these characters lived out their hugest dreams and struggled through their worst nightmares. And I definitely loved all the musician references and imagining what it would've been like to be a young musician living the lives they were living.

I enjoyed was the raw truths, the poetic lyrics, and the sometimes shallow and sometimes profound insights that these characters revealed. Strangely, or not, many of these things resonated with me and lingered in my head and I especially loved the lingering nostalgia and bittersweetness that seemed to hang around long after I was finished reading. I recently saw that Amazon picked this novel up to be a short series and I'm thrilled to see  what they do with it.

BUY IT on AMAZON.

Synopsis:
A gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous breakup.

“I devoured Daisy Jones & The Six in a day, falling head over heels for it. Daisy and the band captured my heart.”—Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine book pick)
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 ’n’ 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.