Daisy Jones and The Six

This book was so much fun. It's a little bit Almost Famous, a little bit That Thing You Do, and a little bit Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. It follows the meteoric rise and fall of Daisy Jones and The Six, a rock band in the late 70s. It's told as an oral history, as the various members of the band and the people surrounding them talk about coming together, recording their album, going on tour, and how everything fell apart.

Taylor Jenkins Reid does a fantastic job of creating complex and memorable characters. Especially since the book is 100% dialogue. And everyone is just telling the story as they remember it. Sometimes their accounts are in direct conflict with each other (who won a bet, who stormed out), and it's up to the reader to decide who to believe.

That unreliability of the narration adds to the atmosphere of the drug-soaked seventies. Who can be sure of anything? And how many of these problems got so much worse because no one was ever sober? Reid does a great job of using the chorus of voices to pain a fascinating picture. I had a hard time putting this book down. It was exactly the sort of escapism I need right now.

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