Book #89 of 2019:
Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
I’ll admit I wasn’t immediately hooked by this oral history of a fictional 70s rock group, yet I found myself fairly riveted by the end. The ‘behind-the-music’ format is familiar for a documentary but pretty unusual for a novel, and author Taylor Jenkins Reid uses it to flesh out some fascinating personalities for the band in question. Their passions and jealousies feel quite true-to-life, and the developments on their way to fame and its aftermath come off as wholly earned. It’s a great character-driven drama that hardly seems like fiction at all, which is no easy feat for a writer to achieve.
I do have one small critique, however: although the interview subjects contradict each other at times, these statements are generally juxtaposed immediately next to one another to make the discrepancy plain, and it’s usually clear which ones we’re supposed to understand as false. I still enjoyed the story despite this, but I think Reid could have gotten more mileage out of the untrustworthy narrator conceit and created a more nuanced narrative by not calling such overt attention to it.
[Content warning for substance abuse, abortion, and brief mention of statutory rape.]
★★★★☆
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