Book Review: Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six: The band’s album Aurora came to define the rock ‘n’ roll era of the late seventies, and an entire generation of girls wanted to grow up to be Daisy. But no one knows the reason behind the group’s split on the night of their final concert at Chicago Stadium on July 12, 1979 . . . 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. 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.

To everyone who doesn’t know, I had read this book in 2019 when it had first come out. I hadn’t loved it one bit, and actually, I hadn’t even bothered to finish it. I wasn’t finding it interesting in the slightest, and the style in which this book is written wasn’t working either. All in all, it was a disappointment.

However, after coming across thousands of positive reviews of it, I thought it was worth one more shot. Also, some weird force made me want to pick it up again and actually finish it this time, and boy did I have a good time reading this! What a wonderful ride it was!

Daisy Jones & The Six is the story of a rock band in the 70’s that part ways, but nobody knows the real reason behind their split.

This book is written in an interview format (like a documentary) and talks about the history of the band using collective and personal memory. Some of the time people’s accounts of one incident do not match with that of others.

This book is not just the story of 70s rock and roll or drugs and sex, it’s much more than that. It’s also about the hardships of life, complexities of love, and about not settling for less than what you deserve.

The plot of this book is very simple, but the characters are so complex, different, and feel so real, and there is SO much character development!

Two things that I loved about this book are the great depiction of female friendships and the depiction of feminism in the late ’60s and early ’70s and sometimes even in today’s world. It even calls out society’s double standards when it comes to gender.

This book has many quotes that were so powerful that I would love to write them down and stick them to my bedroom walls.

Even though this book wasn’t hard for me to read personally, I would still tell you to not read it if you feel triggered by reading about drug addiction, infidelity, sexual assault/pedophilia, mention of a heart attack, death, and abortion.

However, I would totally recommend reading it for the brilliantly developed characters, some powerful passages, and wonderful writing.

Have you read this book? What were your thoughts? Let’s talk! 💬