Daisy Jones & The Six

Daisy Jones & The Six

By Taylor Jenkins Reid
Published: Ballantine Books, 2019
Pages: 368
Genre: Fiction
Amazon, Goodreads

Which is what we want from art isn't it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of heart out and shows it to you? It's like they are introducing you to a part of yourself. And that's what Daisy did, with that song.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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.

REVIEW

I love the concept behind Daisy Jones and The Six. I'm 28 but a classic rock fan; I love Elton John, The Beatles, Heart, CCR, AC/DC, etc. I really wanted to love this book... but I just couldn't.

Ultimately, the formatting is what gets in the way of the story. The book is executed very creatively. It's set up like a documentary; interviews of different individuals are spliced together to tell a story. It wasn't that distracting at first until one character would say one line then another character would say one line... I felt like it took away from the story.

Here's an example from the book:

Simone Jackson (disco star): I remember seeing Daisy on the dance floor one night at the Whisky. Everybody saw her. Your eye went right to her. If the rest of the world was silver, Daisy was gold.

Daisy: Simone became my best friend.

Simone: I brought Daisy out with me everywhere. I never had a sister. 

I feel like the story could contain the same elements but have a nicer flow if there were actual scenes written between the interview dialogue.

Because of the book's format, I think Daisy Jones and The Six will translate better as an audiobook. I'm not an audiobook fan, but I'm willing to give this novel another try in its audiobook format.

I know the paper book is getting a lot of good reviews, and I do think it's a good story, but it just wasn't my cup of tea.

MY RATING