Reviews with content warning for Blood - Daisy Jones & The Six

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Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

127 reviews

cowardthedog18's review

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted reflective relaxing sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Daisy Jones and The Six is a great example why the 1980’s-1990’s was the best time and worse time for Bands. It takes you into a world of friendships, Brotherhood, situationships, and relationships. And made the book about love, family and addiction. Perfection at its finest.

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mymylight52's review

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emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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emily_zylstra02's review

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emotional inspiring fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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paulwesterberg's review

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adventurous hopeful reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.75

Simone: . . . This was a girl that hadn't ever released a single piece of work. No album, no single. But she was in the magazines in photos with rock stars. Everybody loved her.

the oral history genre is really difficult even for historians to master. and the key part of building an oral history is to accrue hours and hours and hours of content, and then to go back and slash through it all; kill your darlings. you can’t necessarily do that with a fiction novel, without maybe feeling like you’re wasting a whole lot of time.

daisy jones & the six fell flat for me in large part because of how dishonest i perceived it to be to the craft of oral history. none of the conflicts felt real, few of the characters felt real, everything felt so contained in a way that real life rarely is. it feels unfair to critique a work of fiction for feeling like exactly that, but it was incredibly difficult for me to suspend my disbelief and read this as an oral history. but that's the challenge you take on by choosing such a distinct format for your story. i think i could've enjoyed this novel a lot more if it didn't mimic the oral history.

furthermore, moving beyond the key fact that none of the characters felt like real people—or, worse, like cardboard cutouts of real life musicians—taylor jenkins reid's greatest weakness as an author to me has always been her pacing. i noticed it in the seven husbands of evelyn hugo, and oh boy, did i notice it here; it was grotesque, at times. it's much harder to cover up any flaws in your pacing when your book is so hinged on its organization.

for billy to have his drug issues and then sober up so quickly was incredibly frustrating to me. it felt like there were no stakes every time he discussed his fear of relapse, because we barely got to see him at his lowest in the first place. we were constantly being told he was a “reformed” man, but it felt like he never even had anything to reform from. and for daisy to have constantly been portrayed as perfect, save for her drug issues—eye roll. being constantly told that your main character is just effortlessly amazing is grating. and this is such a minor, technical complaint—but for reid to portray her as an almost textbook heroin addict, and just be too afraid for her perfect main character to actually be a heroin addict is also infuriating.

unfortunately, this book just wasn't it for me. i didn't like daisy, and the way i was told so many times that i should; i didn't like billy, and how he felt entirely one dimensional; in fact, i only liked karen, and sometimes eddie, i think. and if there was supposed to be a plot twist, color me unimpressed—an oral history is not necessarily a plot-oriented form for telling your story, is all i have to say on that front.

sigh. i wonder if the series is any better.

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bookcaptivated's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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eleanora's review against another edition

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reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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zerenreads's review

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challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Daisy Jones & The Six is the story of the titular rock band's rise to fame and the ever-shifting and changing dynamics between its members throughout this period.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, which I feel is due in large part to my enjoyment of this genre of book. It has all the classic elements of being in one of the world's most famous bands during what many see as the golden age of rock music - tour buses, drinks and drugs, groupies and gorgeous women etc. However, this book also acknowledges the cracks in this facade. It is an interesting and, I believe, important commentary on addiction, and how normalised and glamorised this lifestyle was both at the time and today, and how it is unsustainable to live that way. I think it was so effective because addiction was seen from both sides - from the people themselves, only some of whom were willing to acknowledge that they were endangering themselves, and from those around them who could see the dangers in the way they were acting. There was a passage on page 339 which rang particularly true. "You can't love someone back to health and you can't hate someone back to health and no matter how right about something you are, it doesn't mean they will change their mind." That paragraph perfectly captures the feeling of "throwing someone you love out to see and praying they float on their own, knowing they might drown and you'll have to watch.'

This is now the third Taylor Jenkins Reid book I have read, and I have rated all of them 5 stars. I love her style of writing in general, and how the main characters of her book always include strong, determined, unique women who feel so vibrant and realistic that I almost find myself googling them to learn more about their lives.

An example of this is when Karen is pregnant and decides to have an abortion and Camila decides almost instantly to support her and go to the clinic with her, knowing that Graham's lack of support was difficult to deal with. She says, "A part of me wishes you wanted kids, because my kids make me so happy. But... I think in order to be happy like I'm happy, you need different things. And I want you to have whatever those things are." I thought it was one of the best parts of the book and I was devastated to find it was cut from the television series.

One thing that made this book very unique was the format. It was written as a series of quotes from individual interviews with the characters, but formatted almost like a play.

Eg. Billy: Warren was wearing a red jacket.

Warren: I wore a red jacket everywhere that summer.

I think this format ran the risk of being extremely confusing and/or boring and repetitive with each character telling the same story in slightly different words, however it ended up being extremely effective in my opinion. It was so interesting, and quite funny at times, to see how different members of the band remember and retell the same moments differently in order to make themselves seem better, and reading from the points of view of several people at the same time really felt like it gave readers a full understanding of the bigger picture.

I rated this book five stars because it was gripping, entertaining, tackled nuanced issues with grace and subtlety and had vibrant, realistic characters who were so clear in my minds eye. I loved Warren because he was simply so unbothered throughout the whole thing - while other characters were bickering and arguing he was in the corner smoking a cigarette waiting for everyone to get back to playing music. However, my favourite character was hands down Camila. She is determined and absolutely formidable, and her take on relationships, love, trust and loyalty was so unexpected and different to the mainstream one yet I found myself agreeing with her. She is unwaveringly committed to her family,

and she told Daisy Jones what she needed to hear at a time when nobody else was able or willing to, and in doing so saved her life.

In conclusion, I wholeheartedly recommend this book - it is brilliant and emotional and definitely a great one to ease you out of a reading slump.

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quinn24's review

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medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

formatted like a documentary, Daisy Jones & The Six follows this band through their rise to stardom and subsequent break up. The characters are incredibly realistic and their emotions and behaviours are very real, all of them are unreliable narrators so it’s funny when you read something from one person and then it’s told differently from another. I don’t have any personals experience with addiction but i think that topic was handled with tact.

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kikalox's review

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inspiring lighthearted relaxing fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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_happilyeverafter_'s review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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