I loved their stories
This book made me proud to have grown up exactly when I did. Its a superbly detailed story of three fabulous women whose music really was the sound track of some of the best years ever. Their bumpy and passionate love lives were something so many of us can identify with. I've been watching Carly Simon videos on her web site and elsewhere since I finished the book. I knew it had to end sometime but I really didn't want to say goodbye to these talented, fab women!

The Soundtrack of My Life!
I can't begin to write how much I'm enjoying this book...it's as if the author wrote it just for me! Joni Mitchell is my favorite female artist (James Taylor being my favorite male)--and I have many albums of Carly Simon and a few of Carole King's as well. Reading this book is like reading a soundtrack of my life! At every twist and turn I find out how incestuous the music business is, and how interrelated and connected my favorite musicians are. While the bulk of the book deals with Joni, Carly and Carole, you'll learn tidbits and interesting facts about many other musicians/actors/celebs as well: James Taylor, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Jackson Browne, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson...the list goes on and on.

The beginning was a bit dry (about their childhoods), but once the women start performing in the music business "katie bar the door!" There are fascinating revelations on nearly EVERY page. Reading the book has made me go back and listen to nearly each and every song by all three artists with a new appreciation and understanding. Brilliant!

Hits it out of the park!!
Who thought you could do a biography of three different people, each so distinct in background and sensibility, and yet make it read like a fascinating novel? I would not have thought so until I opened this book. I saw people reading it on trains and on the beach so I thought, okay, I'll try. (Skeptical.) Well, it didn't take too long, like 30 pages in, for me to get hooked. The sheer number of people the author got to talk to her, and the variety of their impressions of these women, made it so revealing, I could barely stop reading. But I did stop from time to time, just to process the information. Carole King and a husband who had a baby with another woman (a singer) while they were married? Joni in Canada as an unknown folksinger smitten by Joe of Joe and Eddie? (I thought I knew everything about her.) Bianca Jagger calling James Taylor about Carly and Mick, and James proposing because of it? Somehow it didn't sound like the National Enquirer, though. It had the weight of a serious social history. I didn't want this book to end.

Good on Details, Short on Meaning
At first glance, Sheila Weller's choice of subjects seems incongruous: Joni Mitchell is one of the transcendent talents of our time. Carole King and Carly Simon, however prolific, cannot possibly come up to that standard. But Weller is concerned with the popular zeitgeist, not comparative musicianship, and we must take her book on its own terms.

Weller writes from a feminine, not a feminist, perspective. She would probably disagree with this assessment, but her particular brand of retrospective feminism has, by now, become so mainstream as to be unexceptionable. We have all come a long way since the 60's.

Three women singer-songwriters, three different life trajectories played out against the background of the 60's. Weller's "parallel lives" succeeds as biography, but fails to extract any greater meaning. I most appreciated her obsessively detailed research; I learned a lot of factual information from this book. Later on, though, it became bogged-down in an interminable and Oprah-like recitation of who slept with whom and how they all felt about it; I would have liked more information about the corporate and sexual politics of the era, and much more about the music itself; for me at least, and I think for many of my generation, it was really all about the music, and the People-Magazine-type shenanigans of its creators and performers are really, more or less, beside the point.

That said, I again praise Weller for her incredibly detailed knowledge and accurate feel of the life and times. It's not exactly the book I had hoped for, but it is certainly worth reading.

Bogs down due to its format
I was really in a state of ANTICIPATION, since, as a boomer, I grew up with these ladies and their music. However, by the book's midpoint, it becomes unwieldy due to combining the lives of these 3 women plus James Taylor as well as some minor players of that era. You really should read it in one sitting or weekend since there are just so many friends/lovers/albums/players to keep track of. Finally, I just read it from the middle on by each singer and skipped the tangential blend of the others. Much easier and far more lucid and rewarding. An ambitious work it should be noted.