Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid * * * * *

I read Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt number 42, "A book inspired by a real song, album, band, artist, or musical." Going into it, I expected it to be fine at best. Contemporary fiction is not usually my thing. I tend to gravitate towards fantasy, science fiction, and stories with larger than life stakes. Here, there are no quests, no alien worlds, no one trying to save humanity. There are only people. Messy, talented, selfish, loving, complicated people. And somehow, this became one of the biggest surprises of my reading year.

I ended up giving it five stars.

The story follows Daisy Jones and the members of The Six, a hugely successful rock band in the 1970s. But what makes the book stand out is its format. Rather than a traditional novel, it is presented as an oral history. The entire story unfolds through interviews, with each character recounting events years later. Because I listened to the audiobook, this format absolutely came alive. Every character had their own narrator, and the result felt less like a book and more like listening to a documentary or a reunion special. It genuinely felt as though these people had lived through these events and were now looking back on them.

I honestly think this is one of those rare cases where the audiobook might be the definitive experience.

The cast was phenomenal. Nobody sounded like they were reading lines. They sounded like people remembering their lives. The voices gave each character a personality and an emotional weight that made them feel startlingly real. At times, part of my brain almost forgot that Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne weren't actual musicians.

One of my favourite aspects was the way the interview format played with memory and perception. Two characters could remember the exact same event completely differently. There is a funny moment involving a bet where both participants remember themselves as the winner. Other times, one character observes somebody's actions and assigns motives to them, while the person in question had entirely different reasons. It highlights how unreliable memory can be and how easily people misunderstand each other. History itself becomes subjective. Everyone tells the truth as they remember it, but no two truths are exactly the same.

That nuance gave the story a feeling of authenticity.

I was also surprised by how attached I became to the characters. Even though I normally dislike books that involve drug abuse, I thought it worked here because it became part of the toxicity surrounding fame, relationships, and self-destruction. It wasn't glamorous. It was ugly, painful, and destructive, and that felt important to the story.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all was simply discovering that I loved a type of book I would normally never pick up. That is one of the reasons I started the PopSugar Challenge in the first place. Some prompts push me outside my comfort zone. Sometimes that leads to disappointing reads, but sometimes it leads to wonderful surprises like this.

I wholeheartedly recommend this one, but I especially recommend the audiobook. The full cast elevates an already excellent story into something immersive and unforgettable.

Sometimes the books you expect to like become disappointments. And sometimes a story about a fictional band from the 1970s makes you forget they were never real in the first place.