REVIEW: DAISY JONES & THE SIX, BY TAYLOR JENKINS REID

 

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.

 

My Thoughts: There was something serendipitous about the joining of Billy Dunne and his band together with Daisy Jones, a Hollywood girl who seems undisciplined, but who has the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll coming out of her pores.

Mixing these two performers had its problems…they each wanted to do everything their own way. How they managed to make it all work was interesting. But would they keep going indefinitely, or would their basic differences split them apart?

Reading the tale of how the band came together, and how they made it all work—for a while—was fascinating, but also a little challenging, as the writing style of a series of interviews felt more like a play and I had to keep checking to see whose narrative I was reading. The flow felt awkward, but I kept going because the story was one I wanted to follow. I love the 70s and the music from that time.

Toward the end of Daisy Jones and the Six, the story smoothed out for me and I enjoyed discovering what happened to the band and its members. 4.0 stars.***My e-ARC came from the publisher via NetGalley.