They were lovers and friends and brothers and rivals. They couldn't believe their luck, until it ran out. This is their story of the early days and the wild nights, but everyone remembers the truth differently (from book cover).
Rating:★★★☆☆
**spoilers ahead**
**spoilers ahead**
This book has been coming up on my Amazon recommendations for months now and it seems like I've seen and heard about it everywhere. I finally relented the other day, having been on the bus home and listening to a twenty-minute conversation where a woman tried to convince her friend to read this. She didn't convince her friend, but she convinced me.
I was up for reading a book about a band on their rise and fall, and the author has spoken about how the book expresses a positive and important voice for women in music, so I was expecting something rather groundbreaking. In that sense, I was disappointed; it had positive messages about being yourself, but of the four women in the story only Daisy really had any layers for me. We have Karen, the drummer who has struggled to be taken seriously, Camila, the wife and mother and Simone, Daisy's musician friend. Of them all, I found Camila the most frustrating - she is described as a force of nature by one of the band members, but she just didn't seem real to me. No one real could just sit there and goes along with the crap she goes through with Billy the way she does. You can choose to stay, but you can get angry first.
Something I hadn't realised about the book was it was told through interview quotes from the fictitious band, all commenting on the timeline. Sometimes it worked - such as when the band were weighing in on the name of the band and each of them had a different recollection of the same conversation, and that was funny - and sometimes it didn't. Sometimes it was just really difficult to connect with the story, as important memories outside of Daisy and Billy were just breezed over. I get it was about the band, but you still need to understand your characters.
From reading around this book, it seems we may see a TV adaption of this story and I am up for that. The problem I had with this book was there wasn't enough time to really get to know the characters but in a show visually you can connect with them, say "oh yeah, they're in this conversation". I did enjoy this story, even if I think the ending was crap and frustrating (think the ending of How I Met Your Mother), and I think there is a lot of opportunity for expanding and adding layers and depth. So I would probably watch this.
Overall, it was a pretty good read and I was able to finish it in a day, a feat I have not managed for a long time so I am thankful to this book for giving me that nice feeling. I will be keeping an eye on this author's books, and am already considering her last book, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which is written in the same style as far as I can gather.
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