Reviews with content warning for Injury/Injury detail - Daisy Jones & The Six

Reviews tagging 'Injury/Injury detail'

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

74 reviews

mymylight52's review against another edition

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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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paulwesterberg's review against another edition

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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.

Spoiler

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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scmiller's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

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

4.0

4.1/10

Enjoyed the narrative technique of the novel — characters recounting events in an interview, engaging in dialogue with the interviewer.

I was impressed with how Jenkins Reid’s wrote her characters’ dialogue so conversationally. It was convincing and effortless.

I liked the stark discrepancies and contradictions between characters when recounting events. They were all unreliable in that way and I like how the story leaves the truth unclear.

I have a love/hate relationship with novels that are about music. It’s the same dissatisfaction I feel when watching cooking shows. You can describe it and show it to me all you want but it’s not in my mouth.

I consumed this novel via audiobook and really loved that there was a full cast. It was like I was listening to a play on the radio. It was so emotive and artistically done. Arguably one of the best audiobook narrations I’ve heard.

I found the ending of the band sudden. We all knew it was coming but yet I still found the way it was written anticlimactic and incomplete somehow, and not in a satisfying literary way.

I found the attempt at actually writing the band’s hit song “Honeycomb” and playing it at the end of the audiobook embarrassing??? You can’t write a novel and paint a picture about how extraordinary and talented and huge this band was and then expose my ears to whatever that was and expect me to say, yes, people definitely would have gone crazy over this song. It was cringey.

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quinn24's review against another edition

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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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