Daisy Jones & the Six

By Taylor Jenkins Reid

☕︎☕︎☕︎

“You can love something and still walk away from it.”

A fictional oral history of a 1970s rock band and the woman who made it legendary. Taylor Jenkins Reid commits fully to the format, and it works better than it has any right to. The interview-style structure creates a story where everyone is reliable and unreliable at once, where the truth keeps shifting depending on who's talking. The undertone of the cultural blame that women ruin rock n’ roll, or that women “break the band apart,” is felt in the male characters interviews, but leaves the reader cheering Daisy Jones on.

Daisy Jones herself is a genuinely great creation, chaotic, brilliant, magnetic, and deeply self-destructive in ways that feel specific rather than cliche. The music era is conjured with real atmosphere. And the central relationship at the heart of the band has a heat to it that the format somehow amplifies.

It's not a deep book. But it's an extraordinarily fun one, and it does exactly what it sets out to do.

Three cups: a great beach read with better bones than you'd expect.