BOOK REVIEW: Daisy Jones & the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

BOOK REVIEW: Daisy Jones & the Six, by Taylor Jenkins ReidTitle: Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Published by Ballantine Books
Published: March 5th 2019
Genres: Fiction
Pages: 368
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Book Sparks, Publisher
Goodreads

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.

After reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn HugoEvidence of the Affair, and now Daisy Jones & the Six, I’m convinced that Taylor Jenkins Reid’s writing is absolutely magic, and I found myself wishing that there really was a real Evelyn Hugo and a real Daisy Jones & the Six. I think in 2019 I’m going to read the rest of her backlist titles, because I think TJR is deserving of the buzz that’s surrounded her over the last several years!

Daisy Jones & the Six is structured in the form of interview responses, broken up in sections of the band’s history, and at first I thought this was a little slow at the start, but once the story started developing beyond introductions, I loved the different perspectives of everyone in the band happening all at once as the story is pieced together through snippets of interviews given by the band members. It’s a little confusing at first, but then the story really finds its rhythm.

What do you do when you find a creative soulmate that might actually be more? How do you reconcile that creative spark with someone who drives you crazy? Daisy and Billy’s connection throughout this entire story is an electric charge that eventually becomes undeniable and unavoidable, and through these interviews and eras of the band’s existence, we get to see how it affects them and everyone around them until the band’s split at the height of their career.

One thing I’ve loved about Taylor Jenkins Reid’s writing in the two books I’ve read by her is that it makes you feel something, creates a world in which her characters exist that feels absolutely real, and makes you care about the characters she writes. I wished Evelyn Hugo was real while reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and I wished Daisy and Billy and the band and their tumultuous relationships with each other were real.

Daisy Jones & the Six comes out March 5, 2019, and you’re definitely going to want to add this to your TBRs! A complimentary copy was sent to me by BookSparks and Ballantine Books for review; all opinions are my own.