I read the hardcover of Daisy Jones & The Six back when it first came out and ever since I’ve been curious if the audiobook would’ve been a better experience, so when I saw it was available from my library I decided to give it a listen.
For anyone unfamiliar, although it is fiction, Daisy Jones & The Six is structured as an oral history of a band from the 1970s. So in the audiobook version, each member of the band and all the side characters are voiced by different narrators, making it easy to follow along. Jenkins Reid mostly uses the oral history format to highlight the way different characters remember the same event, with each one’s perspective informing the reader about who they are as people.
The Six are a fairly typical rock band, although a bit overcrowded with two sets of brothers, a hard-partying drummer, and a female keyboardist fighting to be taken seriously in the music business. Daisy Jones is an L.A. scene kid with overpowering beauty, a wild wardrobe, and a debilitating reliance on alcohol and drugs. When she goes from opening act to featured on one song to eventually becoming a part of the band, it presents a problem for lead singer and songwriter Billy Dunne. Billy is a married man and a father who has been in recovery since he missed the birth of his first child due to drunkenness. Daisy’s beauty and talent attract him even as her ego and stubbornness repel him and her drug use scares him half to death.
Jenkins Reid deserves credit for the verisimilitude of her writing. The characters here all feel like plausible ex-bandmates, and she quickly establishes the reality of the 1970s setting. But I have to say that on my second encounter with the story, I came away even less impressed by the plot. This is essentially just what you’d expect it to be from the premise. Some drug use, some infidelity, some infighting among the band, etc etc etc.
The major problem with Daisy Jones and The Six is Daisy Jones herself. Jenkins Reid tries too hard to make her cool and ethereal, but really she just comes across as a spoiled brat. In the story’s climactic moment, Daisy and Billy each betray the other, but because Daisy’s transgression comes first, is totally unwarranted, and is absolutely unforgivable, Billy’s response, though cruel, can not come close to balancing out the scales. In conjunction with her irresponsibility, it makes her too unlikeable to really care about whether she and the band will really make it.
