Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

As the last words of this story wrapped up I sat outside looking at the sky and felt pure joy. This story consumed me and I could not stop listening!

SYNOPSIS

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. from Goodreads.

A beautiful woman’s face is shown up close. Her hair is curly and surrounds her face.

REVIEW

Everyone was right. This book is sublime. This audiobook is a full cast recording and I felt like I could reach out and touch this story. Sometimes, I forgot that Daisy Jones & the Six weren’t a real band from the ’70s. When I remembered, I was sad because that meant that these real characters ceased to exist when the story ended. But while it played, I was mesmerized.

Told in shifting perspectives, masterfully, Daisy Jones & the Six came alive for me. Each character’s feelings and memories were so fully formed that I really felt like I knew them. And these characters…I just loved them (or hated them) all. I just want to sit for a while with someone else and talk about each character one by one. To be clear, Karen Karen, the keyboardist and feminist who was always able to step into anyone else’s shoes is my hands-down favorite. Obviously, I was probably swayed by the fact that Judy Greer voiced this character. Love her and love Karen.

Other characters came and went and affected me deeply. This wasn’t a story about music or performing – and if that is what you are hoping for, this might not be a book for you. This was, essentially, about people’s differing perspectives about a point in their lives that was intense. I loved how each character’s memories were slightly different, either because of time or vantage point. I loved how some people’s memories were just flat out wrong. This isn’t a book about how music was written, it is about the people who made the music.

I have never struggled with addiction nor had family members impacted by drugs or alcohol. So, the frequent mentions of drugs and alcohol didn’t affect me as they might other people. Still, watching certain characters treat drugs and alcohol like air and water was hard. I’m not sure how you could hope to read a book set in 1970’s about Rock and Roll and not find it rife with drugs and alcohol. But, if this is an issue for you, just know it is a huge part of the story.

This book gave me something I always enjoy, a motley crew of characters journeying together. They lived, they rock and rolled, and it changed them. And their stories helped me remember how differently we can all see the same things even when we are looking at them together.

Tell me, please! Have you read this book? If so, what are your thoughts?