Daisy Jones & The Six
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.
Review: Set in the late 60s and early 70s, this book follows the rise and fall of the hit band Daisy Jones & The Six. Framed as a series of interwoven interviews providing an oral history of the band years after it stopped touring, the novel slowly reveals both how the band grew to fame and also the mystery behind why it splintered apart at the height of its popularity. The stars of the band are Daisy - beautiful, talented, but hopelessly addicted to pills and alcohol and Billy Dunne - leader of The Six, he is a brooding recovering alcoholic and struggling to navigate his role as husband and father in the wake of his own father leaving when he was a child. When Daisy Jones and The Six merge forces, they rise to become one of the biggest bands of the 70s.
This book was so well done. I listened to the audible version, which had different actors read each part. It felt like I was listening to a documentary about the hit band and I was so invested in the characters and their stories. The novel quickly jumps from one character's perspective to another, sometimes only featuring a line or two from one character before shifting away, which speeds the book along but also allows for a multifaceted perspective on events as they unfold.
One of the strongest aspects of this book is its women. Daisy, Billy's wife Camila, band member Karen, and Daisy's best friend Simone are all strong women who know themselves, know their strengths, and refuse to bend to the will of men. Each was distinct and unique in her own way and all were fascinating characters. In fact, it is the men, namely the other members of The Six who are more forgettable and whose voices blend together and were hard for me to really differentiate between other than Billy and Graham Dunne, who had very distinct roles and personas. Writing about music is hard to do well because of course the music can never really be captured on the page. Yet in this novel Reid captures the essence of fame and rock and roll in the creation of her fictional band.
Stars: 4
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