Daisy Jones & The Six reads like typical fanfiction.
To be honest, I didn’t go into this thinking that I would like it. I’ve read a Taylor Jenkins Reid book before, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and was very disappointed, so I might have gone into this novel with a bit of bias. But while I liked this book better than The Seven Husbands and it had its moments, some of which were humorous, I wasn’t impressed.
It’s written in an interview style, which is a good thing, because I don’t think Reid can write a narrative well. And even then, the content was contradictory (on one page, the band had more of an audience and better music, and then a few pages later, Daisy was bringing the hype), and the romance between Daisy and Billy lacked chemistry and was incredibly affected. Having pages upon pages of Daisy and Billy just staring at each other over the microphone doesn’t make chemistry. The author rushed through the mutual yearning between Daisy and Billy. We knew it was there, but we couldn’t feel the intensity, so it fell flat. And since it fell flat, I couldn’t root for the romance and it was just an annoyance that almost ruined the lives of the only good people in the book: Billy’s wife and children. Speaking of good people, can Jenkins Reid only write about self-centered, insufferable people?
The characters weren’t well-developed. Toward the end, it felt like Jenkins Reid was retroactively adding aspects to Daisy’s personality in order to match it to Billy’s, since they were supposed to be “the same person,” which was supposedly the root of their attraction. They had a drug problem and they liked to write music, but that was the extent of the comparison.
This is a spoiler paragraph, so skip if you want. At the end of the book, Billy’s wife leaves a letter to their grown daughters for them to open after she passed away. She asks them to tell Billy to call Daisy Jones. The notion that the attraction between Billy and Daisy could have lasted that many years or could stand the test of time is laughable. They had a measly attraction that could never last, and Reid should have written their romance a lot differently if she wanted to convey anything else.
The aspects I did like:
- I occasionally liked that you got different perspectives through the interview style. For example, Warren and Graham thought a big part of their band name “The Six” was that it sounded like “sex,” but Karen and Billy didn’t think that was relevant at all. I thought that was a good way to show the different personalities. Unfortunately, the strength of that wasn’t consistent or carried through effectively.
- There were two paragraphs I liked where she described the impact of music and art.
- I liked the song “This Could Get Ugly” that was included in the back. I specifically agree with Billy about the line, “Write a list of things you’ll regret / I’ll be on top smoking a cigarette.” I like that line.
