Wassim

A lot of good insights here, though Nichols started to get repetitive towards the end; the conclusion in particular could have been much shorter than it is. Still worth a read, particularly for anyone cynical and disillusioned by the current social and political landscape. 3.5/5

DNFed somewhere in chapter two (“The Rise of the Six”). I don't know which book everyone else is reading, because what I managed to read was bland and poorly written.

For a book whose main selling point is the oral history/interview format, the execution falls horribly short: the characters talk like a writer imagining how people talk, not how they actually talk. In other words, they talk like writing. Take the following simple example, in which Daisy describes how she started reading when she was younger:

And then it just became habit. I would read anything that was around. I wasn't picky. Thrillers, detective novels, sci-fi

People don't talk in staccato sentences, especially not older rockstars being interviewed about their history and legacy (and especially not ones who are supposed to be as rebellious as Daisy Jones is clearly supposed to be). Let's take a look at a potential alternative by reshuffling using part of the previous paragraph:

My mom had these romance novels, so I'd read those, and it just became a habit. And I'd read anything , thrillers, detective novels, sci-fi, whatever was hanging around, I wasn't picky. It'd be two in the morning and my parents would be having a party downstairs, and I'd just be sitting on my bed with the lamp on, reading Doctor Zhivago or Peyton Place.

Short, blunt sentences have their place, and if this were supposed to be a traditionally written/narrated novel, I might be more forgiving, but in a novel that's supposed to convey people speaking, it instantly kills any realism, particularly when the device is repeated, as the author does to the story's detriment.

Let's look at another example:

Then there was Chuck. And Chuck was a few years older than the rest of us, from a few towns over. But Pete knew him, vouched for him.

One of the most overdone devices in modern writing is the asyndeton, i.e. leaving out the conjunction. Again, it has its place and can be effective when not overdone, but the issue Jenkins Reid runs into is twofold: like so many other contemporary authors, she employs this a lot, and, once again, people don't actually talk like this (or in short sentences). Here's my attempt:

Then there was Chuck from a few towns over. Chuck was a few years older than the rest of us, but Pete knew him and vouched for him.

Jenkins Reid seems to forget (or maybe she never noticed) that actual people use contractions and “skip” commas or periods in their speech; sometimes they mispronounce words or leave the “g” off their gerunds (“talkin” instead of “talking”). They don't always fully enunciate their words, and they definitely don't talk in near-perfect grammar. I've already mentioned it, but if this were a more traditional narrative, and the characters weren't supposed to be a famous rock band, this would be less of an issue. But it isn't, so it is.

And I haven't even touched on the characters yet, who come across as generic and lacking any real depth; at best, they're just tropes. Here's Daisy recounting a memory from high school:

Daisy: High school was not easy for me. I knew that to get an A, you had to do what you were told. But I also knew that a lot of what we were being told was bullshit. I remember one time I was assigned an essay on how Columbus discovered America and so I wrote a paper about how Columbus did not discover America. Because he didn't. But then I got an F.I said to my teacher, “But I'm right.”And she said, “But you didn't follow the assignment.”

According to the start of the book, Daisy Jones was born in 1951, meaning she would've been in high school in the mid-to-late sixties. The dominant view at the time, and for a while after, was that Columbus discovered America (we were still taught this when I was in elementary school in the mid-nineties, though the narrative started to change by the time I was in middle school in the early aughts). Considering the lack of internet or wide access to books and articles that we have now, it's very hard to believe that Jones, as a teenager, would have learned the truth about Columbus.

Granted, she was living in LA, and her parents were artists constantly hosting parties, so it is possible that she may have heard this theory from one of her parents' friends and written about it (though I'm not sure where she'd have found material to cite), but this isn't offered as a potential explanation; instead, we're only told that she “was so bright and her teachers didn't seem to recognize that.” Bright as she may have been, she wouldn't have known to argue against Columbus, unless she wrote the paper simply to be antagonistic (and the “F” then makes more sense). But right there in the excerpt, she says she knows Columbus didn't discover America and insists to her teacher that she's right.

If Jenkins Reid wanted to show Jones being rebellious and willing to stick to her values and what she knows, there were so many better ways to do it than using fucking Christopher Columbus. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, as second-wave feminism was gaining momentum; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (prohibiting racial discrimination in voting) would have been passed when Jones was starting high school; wouldn't either of these have been a much more fitting and believable topic for a young, independent woman to write and argue about? If this were set in the late nineties or early aughts, sure, but in the sixties, it breaks immersion and reads more like the author inserting a twenty-first century perspective into the wrong time period (and this is leaving aside the issues in the writing that I've already pointed out elsewhere)

There's more than one way to rewrite the examples I've given here, but the end result, given what the author is aiming for, should still be flowing speech that somewhat mirrors the characters and their intended personalities. Instead, what we end up with is a bunch of forgettable, paper-thin characters whose dialogue commits the biggest sin: they sound like they were written by a writer who's more concerned with her writing rather than producing characters with depth and personality.

Applegate can't write to save her life, this is mostly filler, and all of the characters sound basically the same. Became even more clear in this book that Applegate has zero idea how teenagers actually talk or act

I'm not sure it's fair to give this an actual rating given its intended audience. I loved these books as a kid and wanted to revisit them over two decades later, but the writing is hard to stomach and full of every YA cliche imaginable (not to mention the characters suffer from all-too-common problem of “Adult doesn't know how to write teenagers”). It's a shame because this is a great concept, and in the right hands it could have been something that holds up into adulthood. Might read a couple more, but I might also just toss out my original idea of marathoning the entire series, even if they are short and easy to read.

It's never a good sign when something that's barely two hundred pages feels like a slog. I liked the idea of a novel being told through several connected ghost stories, but after a relatively interesting start, it fell off very quickly and never recovered. The writing is pedestrian (sometimes insultingly so), the messaging is ham-fisted, but worse of all, it's just boring. There is no tension, there are no scares, the characters are flat with no development, and I found myself skimming by the end just to be done with it.

I'd like to see/read a better version of this, whether as a full novel or a short story, because it's a shame such an interesting idea got wasted with such mediocre execution.

Edit 3/27: I got a notification that someone had liked my review and was confused. Then I realized I'd completely forgotten I ever read this book