“She’s going to be the girl bleeding in a beautiful dress until it kills her.”

Daisy Jones & The Six, by Taylor Jenkin Reid

Summary

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 ’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. 

My Thoughts

This book had been on my reading list for a while, since I read Taylor Jenkin Reid’s other book The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. I only got around to it after the Amazon Show released, since I wanted to read the book before watching the show (which I still haven’t). Honestly, I really enjoyed the book. The unique format it’s written in, that of an oral history, is very different at first and takes a bit to get used to. The entire book is written as “dialogue” of sorts from interviews with different members of the band, and it’s explained near the beginning of the book that different people have slightly different recollections of the events of their past. I love this take on the unreliable narrator; instead of learning about the world from one person’s point of view, we get multiple people with differing opinions and recollections and are sort of invited to make our own opinions; it feels objective, in a way, because we are getting all these perspectives.

Some people might think that it’s a love story; that could be further from the truth. The love story pretty much happens offscreen at the very beginning of the book. The rest of the novel is about living your life—it’s about the struggle characters have with addiction, with jealousy, with choosing romance or freedom, with bodily autonomy. SPOILER ALERT: near the end of the book, one character who I won’t name chooses to get an abortion. And it’s a difficult moment. Politics these days are really polarized and this book treats that topic with the respect and solemnity it deserves. It discusses it from the woman’s point of view, and from the man’s point of view. It discusses the fear, the difficult decision making, the grief, and life afterwards. The romance and eventual break-up between the two characters in this book, neither of whom are even main characters, is probably one of my favorite parts of the series because of how well it is built up even as it is sidelined near the beginning in favor of the more explosive parts of the story.

The overall plot is well-written. We follow our main characters, Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne, as they collaborate on an album together as the main song-writers and the tensions that follow. I won’t go into much more detail on the plot since it’s worth reading the book to get too, but I will mention my favorite parts. I love how all the women in this book are written. Daisy, Simone, Karen, and Camila are beautifully written characters who perfectly portray different aspects of female friendship. Karen and Camila stick together throughout the book, and despite Simone’s energy as Daisy’s “token Black best friend” which I think was revised in the TV show by giving Simone her own plotline, from what I could tell based on reviews, Simone and Daisy are a beautiful example of female friendship. The quote from above is from Simone, actually. However, the one connection I wasn’t expecting was the relationship between Camila and Daisy. Camila is Billy’s wife; Daisy is supposedly a threat to that, and despite it all, Camila shows nothing but compassion and kindness to Daisy. I think it’s one of the most beautiful moments of the book; the idea that despite how shitty you feel about yourself, unconditional kindness can really help turn that around in some circumstances.

Overall, I recommend reading the book! I might edit this review once I watch the TV show, but we’ll see. It being me, I made a pinterest board.

Review: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/snippetsfrommymind/lit-taylor-jenkins-reid/