Daisy Jones & The Six
By Taylor Jenkins Reid
Ballantine Books, 9781524798628, March 2019, 368pp.

The Short of It:

An accurate depiction of what fame can do to a person, to a band, to a family.

The Rest of It:

Daisy Jones & The Six has been everywhere. It was chosen for Reese Witherspoon’s book club Hello Sunshine and so many of my reader friends have read it…or tried to. Not everyone has loved it, which is the way it goes when a book hits the scene with so much hype.

I, however, loved it. I’ve not felt like this about a book in a long time.

The story is about the beginnings of a fictional rock band called The Six during the late 60’s, well into the 70’s. Headed up by Billy Dunne, a writer and singer with talent coming out of his pores, The Six clearly has a sound that the record industry immediately notices.

At the same time, Daisy Jones is this barefoot wisp of a thing. Young and strung-out on drugs, but possesses a voice and presence that is hard to ignore. Under the same record label as The Six, it’s only a matter of time before their manager tries to put the two of them together and their chemistry if off-the-charts. The crowd loves them.

What happens when you put two, larger-than-life people together and ask them to share the stage? What happens to the rest of the band? What happens to Billy’s relationship with his wife and kids? What happens to Daisy as she slowly sinks ever deeper into a cloud of drugs, desperately wanting what other people have?

Wow. Wow. Wow. The story started off slow but once I got into it, I could not turn the pages fast enough. Throughout the story there is this sense of doom that I could not shake. I had to know what it was.

The format did not bother me. It’s written like a script so it’s not surprising that it’s slated to be a TV series soon. Reid mentioned that Fleetwood Mac might have been the inspiration behind the book. I can totally see it. What I cannot stress enough is how the story made me feel. It contains that classic mix of love and pain and recklessness and danger. Anyone who has experienced complicated love or love that makes you question everything you know to be true will get totally caught-up in this story. You don’t even have to love rock and roll to get it.

This is a book you must experience for yourself. Read it. Feel it. That’s all I can say about it. Readers have said the audio book is fabulous so if you don’t like the script format perhaps that’s the way to go.

Source: Purchased
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