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Daisy Jones & The Six

"I gave her permission to sound bad.  Think of how you sing when you're singing to the radio at full volume.  When you can't hear yourself, you're not afraid to really belt it out because you won't have to cringe when your voice breaks or you veer off key.  Daisy need that kind of freedom.  That takes a crapload of confidence.  And Daisy didn't actually have confidence.  She was always good.  Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good."

Daisy Jones & The Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reidwas a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and it definitely lived up to the hype.  Wrote in interview style, it's the fictional story of 1970s rock band The Six.  Brothers Billy and Graham Dunne formed the band and it quickly took off.  Fame led to temptation and Billy finds it too much to handle and spirals out of control until his wife, Camila pulls him back from the edge.  Things are going well for the band and Billy when Daisy Jones enters their lives.  Young, spontaneous, and high off of every drug imaginable, Daisy quickly changes the dynamic of the band and challenges Billy in more ways than one.
Being a lover of classic rock I was immediately intrigued by this book.  It was the kind of book you want to sit and read at once.  I wasn't sure how I'd feel about the non-traditional story telling style, but it worked well and flowed smoothly.  You get a great sense of the characters despite the lack of normal narrative.  The dynamic between characters is intense, especially Billy and Daisy.  While this is definitely a book about rock and roll, I also found it to be a book about trust, relationships, and how far people go to battle their inner demons for those they love.  My favorite character was Camila, Billy's wife.  Despite not being a band member, she played a crucial role in the story.  Her devotion to Billy, for better and for worse, showed what marriage should be like and how a husband and wife can make each other better people when they work together.  

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