About the Book:
Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.
Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.
Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.
Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.
The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.
My Review:
“The truth often lies, unclaimed, in the middle.”
I WILL NEVER GET OVER THIS BOOK!!! All the stars to Taylor Jenkins Reid! Everything about this book was a pure delight. I absolutely loved the format! The book is told as a series of interviews with Daisy Jones, a singer and songwriter, as well as with the members of The Six, a seventies rock band. Also included are interviews with their closed friends, managers, wives, journalists and significant others. I was riveted!
Daisy was a lost soul when she met up with the members of The Six but yet she was always a brilliant songwriter and singer in her own right. There is a huge clash of egos when she is asked to join the band and this inside look at this fictional band is how I always imagined real-life bands behaving. Daisy is both strong and fragile, and brilliant but terribly insecure.
“I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else’s muse. I am not a muse. I am the somebody. End of fucking story.”
I was transported back to my teen years listening to seventies rock & roll while reading this book. The story evoked feelings of longing, loss and the rush of hearing a really great song for the first time. The book focuses on the meteoric rise of The Six and what it took in the seventies to make it big. The importance of magazines like ‘Rolling Stone’ and radio airplay seems irrelevant now but that is what made rock musicians superstars years ago. And the non-stop partying is not shied away from here. It’s a wonder anyone ever made it out alive.
“I can’t think of any two things that make you quite as self-absorbed as addiction and heartbreak. I had a selfish heart. I didn’t care about anyone or anything but my own pain. My own need. My own aching. I’d have made anyone hurt if it could have taken some of mine away. It’s just how sick I was.”
I also was enthralled by the book’s three very strong female protagonists. Daisy, Karen and Camila each had their own way of coping with fame, addiction, love and heartbreak. They all felt VERY real to me and I felt like I was reading a non-fiction biography of a favorite rock band. But the main focus of the book was the relationship between Daisy and Billy, the lead singer and songwriter for of The Six. Their chemistry was volatile and they both brought out the best and the worst in each other. Yet the music they made together was pure magic.
“You know how sometimes people will describe other people and say they make you feel like you’re the only one in the room? Billy and Daisy could both do that. But they somehow did it with each other. They each seemed like they thought the other one was the only person in the room. Like we were watching two people who didn’t realize thousands of people were watching them.”
This book is creative, surprising, heartbreaking and uplifting. I can’t recommend it highly enough! Of course there was a stunning twist that I never saw coming. I still have a book hangover a week after finishing and I can’t stop thinking and Daisy, Billy and The Six. This is also the rare book that I have read and also plan to listen to on audio. Don’t miss this book! 5+++++ stars.
“Oh, honey, I can wait/
To call that home/
I can wait for the blooms and the honeycomb.”
(With thanks to the publisher for a review copy.)
About the Author:
Taylor Jenkins Reid is the author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, One True Loves, Maybe in Another Life, and two other novels. She lives in Los Angeles. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @tjenkinsreid.
