The following is a guest post written by Terra Luft.
It isn’t often I read a book in a race to prepare for a series or movie that has been adapted. Usually, I’ve read the book ages ago and have fond memories that I hope the movie or television series will spark and live up to. Because the book is always better. It must be true, given the deeper ways written works can explore characters by the very nature of the form. With Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, the Amazon Prime series was already in production before the book hit my radar. Taylor Jenkins Reid is an amazing author whose work I gobble up and, in the case of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, re-read then gush about to all my reader friends. Seriously, if you haven’t read her work you should. Somehow, this book came out in 2019 and here it was 2023 and I hadn’t read it yet.
I read the book.
I loved the book.
I started watching the series a week later.
I don’t love the series.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the series, but I don’t love it like I anticipated loving it.
There are a lot of reasons why I love the book: It was set in a time that I lived through – the mid- to late 1970’s; It is the story of musicians – which I was at one time in my younger years (Long live the 90’s garage band!); The characters are both a family and a band – both by blood relations and as a found family – which I love stories about and to which I related on many levels. All of this on top of the always compelling writing of Taylor Jenkins Reid that is centered around deeply flawed yet relatable characters that helps me identify themes in my own world. Isn’t that alone one of the best reasons to read a book? I think so.
I’ve been grappling with why I love the book so much more than the adaptation for the small screen, even though I probably would have liked the series more if there had been several years between my reading and viewing. Not to spew discontent about the series, because I do like it and recommend it to so many people to watch (and read), but because I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I felt such different feelings about what amounts to the exact same story just told in different formats.
Here’s what I decided, and it boils down to what I’ve already said: the book is always better. I don’t want this review to include spoilers, so you’ll have to trust me on most of this without many details.
There are several characters who wrestle with substance abuse and addiction but the internal view into these struggles that the book gave us is so much deeper and meaningful for understanding such things than the series could ever do through on-screen dialogue. The relationships between the characters are also deeper and more understood in the book because of Reid’s adept way of exploring the inner characters and their secrets, insights that aren’t spoken aloud between them but are still there on the page.
Am I mad about a kiss on screen that never happened in the book? Yes. Yes, I am. But I also think there was no better way to show on-screen the struggles of wanting to be good people despite other situations and powerful emotions at play which were so well-done in the book.
The timeline is different in the series – cut out huge sections of time, several characters, and entire albums – which is a usual thing when adapting the action of a story that spans over a decade. What I find the most difficult is that, in the contraction of time, you also lose contraction of the underlying character development. Which is inherently why the book is always better.
I highly recommend both the book and the series, but to fully enjoy both don’t consume them one right after the other. Unless you can love them as completely different stories with only basic similarities.