mood music: Fleetwood Mac – the chain
This is definitely my biggest reading disappointment so far this year. I realize it’s only February, but still … I fell for the hype from BookTok.
This post will be pretty short. My main issue with this book was the structure. Unlike other ensemble novels that I have read, the structure here was like that of an audio transcript, which to give credit, Reid does disclose in the prologue that this is a “collection of interviews” with the members of The Six (all parties are fictional). However, I thought it would be that each chapter was from the perspective of a different band member romantic partner, or family relative. That was not the case here, it instead consisted of jumping between interview excerpts of characters, to the point where I had to go back to the first chapter multiple times to identify who was who and what their role was in the band. Reid also gives each character a different recollection of certain events, which is expected as that does happen in real life, but it being multiple different interpretations of an event back to back, line by line, was frustrating and utterly boring. It didn’t help that the main leads, Daisy and Billy, read as terribly annoying. I had to tap out at 52% on kindle, something I haven’t done in years.
I can see why this was a successful TV adaptation, because that’s exactly how the story reads. In my opinion, I believe Reid initially wrote this as a screenplay and then turned it into a book, had it published off the success of Evelyn Hugo and got the adaptation made IRL, rather than shopping her screenplay to the studios.