Review: Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I have a thing about hype. A lot of hyped up media has been ruined for me because people told me just how amazing it was. I am a pretty tough hype critic for this reason. Little Fires Everywhere was totally ruined for me by being a super talked about book. I felt like I completely missed something cause I just didn’t get the hype. I was super skeptical about even reading Daisy Jones and the Six because after awhile, you start to think people are just trying to keep up and liked it because they felt they had to. But you know what…Daisy Jones and the Six was not one of those books. 

I totally get it. I was enthralled with this book. It was completely magical story telling. Once I fell into the rhythm of the interview style, I couldn’t put it down. 

If you have been living under a rock and don’t know what I’m talking about, Daisy Jones and the Six is a novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid about a rock band from the seventies, from it’s humble beginnings to their final show with all the sex, drugs, and rock’n roll in between. 

The characters were definitely dynamic and there was something so raw with how one character would describe a situation and directly below that it would be contradicted by another member of the band. It made me laugh out loud a lot. 

I heard from Carly that this format was made for an audiobook and that she loved listening to it. I was nervous I wouldn’t be able to get into the structure of the book but that is literally not the case. The story flows INCREDIBLY well. There are some difficult parts, times you just want to shake Daisy and hate Billy, but you can’t. 

Billy’s journey is pretty admirable, and I'm really impressed with the honesty. I know it’s a fictional story, but you start to feel like they’re very real people pretty early on. I cringed through a fair amount, but it was a really eye opening look into substance abuse and recovery. I’ve heard the saying, “When you’re an addict, you’re an addict for life” mean, even after rehab and years of sobriety it is a struggle everyday. You really see that struggle, through Billy, in this novel. 

I also think it was an important feminist novel, detailing Daisy’s desires to wear what she wanted without exploitation and Karen, the only female member of The Six, wanting to be a musician rather than a traditional wife and mother. And then there’s Camilla, Billy’s wife. It’s hard not to pity her, but it’s also hard not to idolize her persistence, loyalty, and strength. I don’t know if i could be as forgiving as her.

There’s not much else i can add except that if you were a skeptic like me, don’t be. Go ahead and read this book, listen to it, whatever. It’s totally worth the hype.

I would love a movie version of this book, but I don’t know how it would suit the interview style, which is what I think made the story so compelling. I loved that the characters were responsible for detailing their past with honesty. What are your thoughts on a Daisy Jones movie?