Book Review
Title: Daisy Jones and the Six
Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
Genre: Romance/Contemporary (sort of Historical)
Rating: ****
Review: After reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo I was so excited to jump into Daisy Jones. The opening of the novel starts with the groupie Daisy Jones between 1965-1972 and it’s formatted as an oral history with interviews from the characters detailing the history of the band, but it is filled with unreliable narrators as everyone views events differently. Despite only being 10 pages in I already felt so sorry for Daisy as her parents have practically abandoned her and it is allowing her to get into drinking and drugs. She does have prior looking at for her, but they aren’t the best role models but at least they are trying. By the time Daisy is 16 she is beginning to realise that she has a musical gift which others have noticed and are exploiting her for it, but she isn’t going to take it any longer.
We then jump to perspectives of the Six, a band fronted by Billy Dunne which we know Daisy eventually joins. Billy and his brother Graham have had a hard life being raised by a single mother after their father abandoned them for a new life. The more we learn about the boys and their friends it seems only natural for them to form a band as they with their way through the ranks of the music scene. It was surprising to see that Billy already has a girlfriend Camila, who later becomes his wife as I was fully expecting to see a romance between Billy and Daisy. The first hardship to hit the bank is when one of their guitarist Chuck is shipped out to Vietnam where he eventually dies which really shocked me, but the band continues to evolve with the addition of Karen.
The more I think about it the more the Six remind me of Fleetwood Mac, purely because Karen joining the band mirrors the real-life group especially since we know Stevie Nicks joined the band later on like Daisy will. Stevie and Daisy are also similar as they both joined the bands well after they were established but they also made their groups iconic. However, I am going to have to wait and see if this mirroring continues throughout the novel. As both Daisy and the Six fall deeper and deeper into the sex, drugs, and rock n roll lifestyle we see cracks beginning to appear. Billy micromanages everyone in the band striving for perfection while Daisy won’t listen to reason. She gets a separate contact with the same label as the Six but refuses to with them when the boss tells her she isn’t ready to be a songwriter and perform her own material.
When both Daisy and Billy pull their acts together in different ways it was really touching. Daisy finally learns that sometimes other people know better and you have to roll with it, while Billy cleaned up his act and became a husband and a father to a daughter named Julia. However, the story starts getting interesting when Daisy performs a duet with the Six on a track called Honeycomb. While it becomes an amazing hit it shows the start of a bad relationship between Daisy and Billy. Honeycomb was a song Billy had wrote to show Camila he could be the man she needed and in minutes Daisy turned it into something that made him doubt that no matter what he did he would never be good enough. Despite all this, the duet is getting the relatively unknown Daisy Jones noticed and I feel like everything is going to take off.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, it seems like Billy and Daisy are fighting each other on everything especially as Honeycomb rises further and further up the chart and then at one of their biggest gigs with a Rolling Stone reporter in the crowd, they let loose and freestyle. There is this one tiny almost insignificant moment where Billy and Daisy click and suddenly on stage, they sing like they’re two halves of the same whole but other members of the band aren’t as content to have Daisy and Billy hogging all the spotlight. Despite this, my favorite moment so far is when Karen and Graham who have been dancing around one another since they met finally get together but keep it from the rest of the band, their own little secret. I was surprised that even after recording and touring together Daisy still wasn’t an official part of the band despite feeling like she already was.
As we cross into the second half of the novel, Daisy becomes an official member of the band, but we do see some lingering tension between Billy and Eddie. However, the working relationship between Billy and Daisy had improved dramatically although he chooses to keep her at a distance due to her being an addict and him being a recovering addict. Together they begin writing on their first album as Daisy Jones & The Six, and despite the lack of a central romance, I was really happy with the character dynamics. Knowing that we have now covered the rumours tour and the break up is getting closer with each page I did want to see more dramatic events. Maybe Billy falling off the wagon and struggling to get back on or Billy falling into bed with Daisy and seeing the dynamics change afterward especially considering Daisy has met Camila and Billy’s oldest daughter Julia.
When Daisy and Billy start working together on the new album, no one realises until they look back that they are writing a series of huge hits. When Billy starts to ring out Daisy’s vulnerable side, she retreats but he pulls her straight back into a position where she is uncomfortable, but he is extremely supportive through it all. Daisy does the same thing for him when he finds her at a party and he is obviously uncomfortable and tempted around the drink and drugs, even stepping in when Simone offers him a drink. Despite them only being band mates they support and develop each other the way couples do. Daisy definitely brings up something in Billy no one else does not even Camila.
The moment where Daisy runs into Billy’s arms after nailing a song she was terrified to sing as Billy wrote it about her and about himself and the struggles, they are facing on a daily basis was just divine and more than ever I wanted them to end up together as Billy can really understand Daisy and vice versa even though it would mean taking Billy away from his wife and three daughters. Even if it’s only for one night I felt that this pair deserved to be together. By the time Daisy and Billy are completing the album, things seem strained between the band members. For the managers, it is a full-time job keeping Billy sober and keeping Daisy level enough to work. However, this means that other members of the band are left out like Eddie. Billy even turns his back on his brother who wrote a song he was truly proud of and because it didn’t fit the time of the album Billy rejects it without even considering the time, effort and emotion Graham out into it. We can tell real cracks are forming signalling that everything is going to fall apart soon. Despite everything I really didn’t want the band to fall apart as I have come to love all these characters.
As we approach the ¾ mark in the novel, I was finding Daisy Jones to be less gut-wrenching than Evelyn Hugo but no less hard-hitting. I haven’t cried the way I did for Evelyn, but I have a feeling that Taylor Jenkins Reid is saving it all for the ending. After a seemingly insignificant kiss, Billy wants Daisy out of the band but Graham won’t even entertain the idea as they are so close to the end of the album. This is also the moment where Camila knows there is something more than friendship between the pair even if neither has acted on it. I agree with Daisy here that Billy does feel the same way about her and just refuses to admit it to himself. I also felt that he was staying with Camila not because he loved her but out of fear and obligation to his daughters. Daisy ends up writing a song about the kiss and how Billy made her feel but when he rejects the song knowing it is about him. Daisy who is already angry with Billy takes the song to the rest of the band for a vote on whether or not it should be on the album. It seems at this point Daisy is getting a little too big for her boots and forgets that it’s Billy’s band that he has built from nothing. After they finish recording the album and shooting the cover Daisy jets off to Thailand where she meets Niccolo who she quickly marries in Rome. Despite Daisy’s big attitude, drug benders and rash decisions I think deep down she is a lonely young woman who wants to be loved in the same way the people around her are.
As we cross into the final section of the novel the tension is back between Daisy and Billy but for an entirely different reason and with the world tour approaching it is only going to get worse. Things take a dramatic turn when Jonah, the Rolling Stones reporter comes around to interview the band again, only the dynamics are completely different this time. When Daisy tells Jonah all about Billy’s drug addiction, cheating on his wife and ending up in rehab, Jonah basically blackmails Billy into giving him a better story or he is running the story Daisy gave him. Billy explodes into a rant about how much he hates Daisy and how her talent is wasted on someone like her. The ending of the book and the breaking up of the band weren’t as dramatic as I was hoping for, but it was full of emotion. The most gut-wrenching part was learning that would narrator throughout the novel was Julia, Billy’s oldest daughter and she had been tasked with keeping her dad busy after her mother died. It was also Camila’s dying wish for her daughter to get Billy back in touch with Daisy. The only thing I really disliked about Daisy Jones and the Six was that Steve Nicks and Mick Fleetwood had an affair in real life and this contributed into the splitting of the group and I felt given the chemistry between Billy and Daisy throughout the novel, this was the natural course to go with the relationship, but Reid obviously wanted her story to be slightly different from the source material.
Buy it here:
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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