5 Star Review: Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Two months into the year, I have my first 5 star book to share with you!  It's a novel called "Daisy Jones & the Six" by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and I loved it - a real wow book!  It comes out this Tuesday, March 5th, and I highly recommend you add it to your list!

Don't you love that cover?  It just has such a 70s album cover vibe!  Which is appropriate since this book is about a fictional singer and band in the late 1970s with lots of turmoil - think the movie "Almost Famous" crossed with Fleetwood Mac, though with plenty of original elements too.  (In fact, I had the Fleetwood Mac song "The Chain" stuck in my head while reading it!)  Lyrucs are included for some of the fictional songs - I only wish I could hear them for real.

I am a big fan of Taylor Jenkins Reid, but this book was definitely a departure for her.  I only started reading her books two years ago, but I've now read 5 out of 6, including this one.  The first one I read, "Maybe In Another Life," was one of my top 10 books of 2017, and in fact was one of my top 3 favorite books that year.  "Maybe In Another Life," like "Forever Interrupted" and"One True Loves" (all of which I've read), and "Forever Interrupted" (the one I haven't gotten to yet), are all books in that intersection between chick lit and contemporary women's fiction.  With her last book, "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo," she moved a bit into historical fiction, as it cuts between a contemporary storyline when a young writer named Monique is summoned to write the biography of fictional (and many times married) aging movie star Evelyn Hugo, and Evelyn's life story which unfolds as she tells it to Monique.

But this book was definitely different.  I'm not sure if it's appropriate to call "Daisy Jones & the Six" historical fiction, as it's set in the 1970s, which doesn't seem quite old enough to qualify as historical.  But it's definitely not contemporary fiction, nor do I think anyone would call it chick lit.

But the bigger departure of this book, not just from her other books but from pretty much everything else I've ever read, too, is that it's told in a very unique format - as if it is an actual oral history.  So it's written as if an "author" has interviewed all the key figures and compiled them into a chronological re-telling, and so the speaker changes every paragraph or two, maybe a page at most.  At first I thought this was going to make it hard to get a feel for the characters, but it was in fact the opposite - before long, it was like I had forgotten I was even reading a novel and felt like they were all real people.  Indeed, that's what this book shares with Taylor Jenkins Reid's other books - her knack for really bringing her characters to life.

I seriously couldn't put it down.  Have you ever read a book where you cry a little at the end not just because you're moved, but also because you're sad it's over?  This was one of those books.

If you're already a fan of Taylor Jenkins Reid, know going in that it's definitely a different kind of book, but definitely read it!  And if you haven't previously read her books, definitely check this one out!  I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.