{Release Day Review} Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (@TJenkinsReid @RandomHouse)

A gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous break up.

Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the real reason why they 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. 

Another band getting noticed is The Six, 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 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.

Daisy Jones was born for the stage. She’s the child of stars who are far more interested in themselves than in raising their young daughter.  On the Sunset Strip, she becomes a legendary figure in her own right. With her beauty and unique voice, she soon attracts the attention of the Dunne brothers and their band – The Six.

You’ve got a rich white girl, growing up in L.A. She’s gorgeous—even as a child. She has these stunning big blue eyes—dark, cobalt blue. One of my favorite anecdotes about her is that in the eighties a colored-contact company actually created a shade called Daisy Blue. She’s got copper-red hair that is thick and wavy and…takes up so much space. And then her cheekbones almost seem swollen, that’s how defined they are. And she’s got an incredible voice that she doesn’t cultivate, never takes a lesson. She’s born with all the money in the world, access to whatever she wants—artists, drugs, clubs—anything and everything at her disposal.

But she has no one.

Billy and Graham Dunne struggled to make a name for their band in Los Angeles. Through sheer determination, they manage to land a record deal with Runner Records. Their first album makes a small splash but now the pressure is on to produce a hit.  
 
And that is when someone suggests a duet with none other than Daisy Jones.  
 
Daisy and Billy are like fire and gasoline.  The hostility between them only serves to fuel the creative process and as a result, their first hit single is born.  
 
As they shoot up the charts, the more the temptations creep in. 
 
How can they ever survive falling for the one person that they can never ever have?

​Billy started playing and I caught his eye, for just a moment, before I started singing. And…[pauses] It just seemed so obvious, so painfully embarrassingly obvious. Without Nicky there to distract me, without keeping myself so drugged up I wasn’t even mentally present, it just seemed so obvious that I loved him.

That I was in love with him.

And getting high and going to Thailand and marrying a prince wasn’t going to make me stop. And him being married to somebody else…That wasn’t going to stop it either. I think I finally resigned myself to it in that moment. Just how sad it all was.

And then I started singing.

Daisy Jones & The Six is the ultimate front row seat to experience the delirious high of a runaway success and the crippling low of a shattered heart.
 
Taylor Jenkins Reid captures all of the excess of the 1970’s with a visionary style that reads like an article in Rolling Stone.  Her characters pour their souls out on the pages. Sometimes infuriating and sometimes defenseless, their accounts of what it was like to be a part of one of rock and roll’s most iconic bands left me with far more questions than answers.
 
But it’s the way that both Daisy and Karen embody the feminism of their era that truly resonates with me on every level. The sacrifices that they made in the quest for fame cannot be erased.
 
And their time in the spotlight – however brief – cannot be forgotten…

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