After reading Daisy Jones and the Six in one day, I just knew I had to then watch the TV show and scream about the book to someone or anyone who would listen.
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
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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 ’n’ 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.
Set in the iconic age of rock and roll, we meet Daisy Jones and The Six (two separate entities) as they come up and join together as the biggest band in the world. This is the first book in a while where I’ve been able to sit down and read it fully cover to cover in one day.
The story itself is exciting, angsty and unput-down-able. A lot of inspiration is drawn from Fleetwood Mac and the breakdown of Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship. However there’s a clear love story that has postive connotations throughout.
The book’s format is very much a docu-style series of interviews. Sometimes it feels like some characters are next to one another, and other times it’s individual. However each cahracter is being asked about the same experiences from their point of views.
One thing I loved was that the characters are talking to the interviewer throughout, and you can clearly see where there’s two sides to a story OR a characterter is mis-remembering, whether on purpose or not, what has happened. This means that there’s a level on unreliable narrator, we’ll never truly know what happened to split the beand but here’s the closest to finding out we’ll be.
There’s also a clear theme throughout about substance abuse and addiction. Many characters are purely recreational users, but there’s others who really suffer. I enjoyed that there’s multiple perspectives, and even one of the management POV’s asks the question of whether they should have stepped in and stopped it or managed it so the characters aren’t taking more than they should. There’s also the fact that none of the characters really get better, there’s always a tempatation or a relapse that could happen which is so realistically written. .
Daisy Jones is a confident, sex symbol-like singer songwriter and seems to effortlessly suceed as she grows up on the Strip and then becomes a musician. Not wanting to be a muse to someone, but to be the someone we see her develop over the course of the book and come up against her vulnerabilities and issues like substance abuse. We watch a vulnerable young girl blossom into a women who can’t quite communciate what she needs, in a situation where she’s never going to win.
On the other side of the substance abuse coin we see Billy Dunne who has severe problems very early on in the life of The Six, and turns it all around to be a father and husband that can be trusted. We see thow helpful it is to have a Camila, Teddy Price and family to be there for you and help, and this contrasts with poor Daisy who most often feels alone even when she’s with people.
Karen Karen is the complete opposite of Daisy Jones in how she makes her place in this man’s world as a woman, but Reid never makes them opponents. Both of them come to suceed in their own ways, and they never get pitted against one another which I loved. Karen also gets one of the most raw storylines in the book, and I adored the matter of fact way she handled her problem without judgement. Whilst other characters did judge her, and with emotional impact – I found this plot point to be super realistic, and how women are still treated today often.
Speaking of strong female charatcers we also have Camila, Billy’s Wife. I found we saw and heard of Camila a lot throught the lens of other characters thoughts, who all few her very highly as a good person. But I liked that we’re also shown that she’s not perfect in some ways, but her maturity and decisions are often made without judgement. I did also love how we do see how her faith in her love and mariage is a constant that Billy can always find.
We do also get the POV from the other The Six band members but as stated in the book, they’re not quite “the chosen ones” in this story. Graham, Pete, Warren and Eddie all bring their thoughts, tensions, and some of their lives into the story but it’s focus is really Daisy and Billy and how their decisions have affected the band.
All in all, I will be recommending Daisy Jones and the Six to anyone who will listen, it’s the perfect book for a summer afternoon of reading and I can’t wait to read more from Reid.
Positives of Daisy Jones and the Six
- Can’t put it down once you start reading
- Exceptional characters
- Story is captivating like it was an actual band in the 70s
Negatives of Daisy Jones and the Six
- Format creates unreliable narrator effect
- Strong trigger warnings needed
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