Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid - ★★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Taylor Jenkins Reid

GENRE: Historical Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: March 5, 2019

RATING: 4.25 stars.

This is such a tough book to rate! I’ve been going back and forth on the rating until I finally settled at 4.25 stars.

Don’t get me wrong. The story is mind-blowing. Daisy Jones & The Six is about a rock band from the 1970s. Supposed to be an iconic rock group and yet having mysteriously split overnight after a concert in Chicago, the band is an enigma that this book seeks to decode. Everything you can think about the 70s rock scene is present in the book: larger than life characters, drugs, sex, music, the highs and lows of fame, the shattered personal life,… And it includes even more than these predictable topics. The book puts the reader right in the middle of the action. Every bit seems as honest as possible. I've hardly ever seen a more realistic book about something as far-fetched from our routine lives as a 70s rock band.

So far, so good, right?

Now comes the "zara hatke" part. The book isn’t written in typical prose format but like a documentary that you are reading instead of watching. An interview structure, if you want to call it that. The narrative concept is that a fictional author is speaking to members of 1970s rock band called "Daisy Jones & The Six" in order to write their biography. Additional narration is provided by the band members' loved ones, friends, and associates. That's such an innovative way of writing a book. Kudos to the thought! But it doesn't quite work as well.

Sample these lines:

Billy: I’d been infatuated before, called it love. But when I met [Camila], it was something different altogether. She just … made the world make sense to me. She even made me like myself more. She’d come watch us practice and listen to my new stuff and give me really good notes on it all. And there was a calmness to her that … nobody else had. It felt like when I was with her, I knew everything would be fine. It was like I was following the North Star.

Camila: When Billy met my parents for the first time, I was a little nervous. You only get one chance to make a first impression, especially with them. I picked out his outfit, down to his socks. Made him wear the only tie he had. They loved him. Said he was charming. But my mom was also worried about me putting my trust in some guy in a band.

Billy: Pete was the only one who seemed to understand why I’d have a girlfriend. Chuck, one time, as we were packing up for a show, said, “Just tell her you aren’t a one-woman guy. Girls get that.” [Laughs] That was not gonna work on Camila.

Warren: Chuck was real cool. He would cut right to the heart of something. He sort of looked like he’d never had an interesting thought in his life. But he could surprise you. He turned me on to Status Quo. I still listen to them.

Now imagine that instead of reading the above, you heard them. It would be a much different experience, correct? More conversational! Now let’s increase the scope of our imagination. Imagine each person above is voiced by a different person. Don’t you think that would change the entire dynamic of the book?

So that’s the crucial point, the differentiating factor, the USP of the audio version of this book.. I HEARD the book, and it is mind-blowing! There are multiple narrators, each voicing a particular character with genuine emotions. The entire audiobook feels like a documentary in your head. You ebb and rise with the characters and their joys and troubles because of the superlative narration. It sounds so authentic that you forget that this is a book and start believing that the characters talking actually existed in real life. I don;t think I would have experienced the same high if I had read the book. So how do you rate a book that doesn't work quite well as a book but beats the best of documentaries though it is based on fiction?

Rating the book for its storyline? It’s a 4.5! (Loved how it went beyond typical done-to-death plots.)

Rating the book for its writing format: Sorry. That’s a 3.5. (Brilliant imagination, but didn’t work with me.)

Rating the audiobook for its narrators? It’s a 10/5!!!

Now you decide if you want to "read" it or not!