Rolling off the deep couch cushions onto the floor, my heat-slicked skin sticks to my pajamas.
It is mere hours after Hurricane Helene wiped out Asheville’s power grid and I do not know flood waters are covering Western North Carolina mere miles from the apartment I am in, waking up just moments before on my friend’s couch in Weaverville to spotty cell service and no air conditioning.
All I know is I am Gen-Z without access to Instagram and need something to entertain myself while I wait for my friends to wake up. I assume the power will be on in a few days, if not a few hours. I pop up off the floor and pad over to my friend Kiersten’s bedroom to temporarily steal a book from her healthy collection akin to my own. She won’t mind, right?
I bend down so I am eye-level with her shelf full of well-loved paperbacks, crystals of all types and many books I’ve read before, like “Beach Read” by Emily Henry and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin. Leafing through her collection, a coral spine sticks out, one I’ve meant to read but haven’t yet, saving the historical fiction, drama and romance for a rainy day.
Reaching between books, sure not to knock anything out of place, I slide the paperback from the shelf. The cover reads “Daisy Jones and The Six” by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
*
I’ve read Reid’s works before but was nervous to pick this one up in the past because of how hyped the book is on social media, afraid the book would not live up to its namesake. Many people know Reid for her hit book “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” While the latter is popular, “Daisy Jones and The Six” tops reading lists all over the globe, even garnering its own Amazon Original Series in 2023 with famous actors Suki Waterhouse and Sam Claflin.
Daisy Jones and The Six, published in March 2019, reads as an interview-style biography from the perspective of the Los Angeles 1970s rock band scene. The book touches on addiction, death, abortion and abusive relationships, among other heavy topics, all while showcasing the dazzling world of touring artists at the time.
This is one of those books that forced me to ruminate on how there are no good and bad people. Human nature is explosive, exploitative, explorative and nuanced all at the same time.
Starting off slow in the beginning, the book builds by introducing the characters of The Six before they collaborate with Daisy Jones for the first time, after coming off a failed first tour. Billy and Graham Dunne, Warren Rhodes, Pete and Eddie Loving and Karen Karen, AKA Karen Sirko, comprise the original six of the band, pre-Jones’ addition, allowing for the story to pick up speed toward the midpoint.
“Let me sum up that early tour for you: I was getting laid, Graham was getting high, Eddie was getting drunk, Karen was getting fed up, Pete was getting on the phone to his girl back home, and Billy was all five, at once,” Rhodes said on page 67.
It is possible the story felt slow at my first inception because of the significant gaps in my reading time. My overall read time was 17 days. Typically, I finish a book a few days after I pick it up.
This one took me a bit longer, partially because I evacuated to my parent’s house in Michigan after starting it. After I arrived at the new location where I currently stay, I couldn’t continue reading it with the same gusto I typically do when reading a “romance.”
Nothing stands out to me about the beginning of the book that suggests there is anything wrong with it. After thinking about it for a while, however, the characters were not magnetic enough in the first 100 pages to get me to open it back up without making myself.
My opinion quickly changed once the band went on tour after Billy, the lead singer of The Six, and Jones started writing their album together.
In this instance, the character leadup did not grab me. I live for drama. Daisy sleeping with random rockstars and doing a bunch of cocaine didn’t make me care for her as a character.
Eddie Loving complaining about Billie Dunne every other page made me want to take a pair of scissors and cut every line of his out of the book until I fell in love with Simone Jackson, Jones’ bestie. Some of the most hard-hitting lines for me came from Jackson.
“But at some point, you have to recognize that you have no control over anybody and you have to step back and be ready to catch them when they fall and that’s all you can do. It feels like throwing yourself to sea,” Jackson said on page 299.
This quote hit me super hard because I’m a control freak, but nonetheless, I highlighted it. It stuck with me.
Don’t even get me started on Camilla Dunne, Billy’s wife. It feels like an insult to her entire character arc, calling her “Billy’s wife,” but this is how she is introduced at the story’s beginning. At times, Camilla was like the glue keeping the spine together.
“All I will say is that you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding,” Camilla said on page 302.
There is consistent messaging about relationships complicating everything, but in the end, it’s all a lesson to be learned. I relate much to the struggles of these characters within their relationships.
The author’s intoxicating way of laying out their deep struggles and boundless friendships on the page within a conversation with the interviewer alone was intoxicating. Many moments were so raw that it was hard for me to keep turning the page—in a good way, of course.
The characters continuously made me laugh out loud between the hard-hitting moments. With each page turned, I looked forward to Jones’ fierce feminism and spitfire comebacks.
With all this being said, where is the romance? Hello?
Getting into the nitty-gritty of the story after about three-quarters of the way in, I soon put my foot in my mouth.
Reid said the book is loosely based on Fleetwood Mac from the 1970s, during the height of Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship.
Picture Stevie Nicks belting her heart out at Lindsay Buckingham, live at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, in 1997, during Fleetwood Mac’s performance of Silver Springs.
Finally, dynamite.
“I thought love was bombs and tears and blood. I did not know that it was supposed to make you lighter, not heavier. I didn’t know it was supposed to take only the kind of work that makes you softer. I thought love was war,” Jones said on page 245.
Each character has a different voice. The writing style continues to pull the viewer in with just the writing alone, with how characters speak so distinctly from each other. Even if I didn’t know who was talking, I could tell the difference between the characters based on how they spoke to the interviewer.
I initially rated this book five stars after completing it but have knocked a star off my rating because it took me so long to care about the characters, even as I believe Reid kept us separated emotionally from Jones on purpose to make her addiction feel foggy to the reader. It’s a smart move, but it doesn’t work for me. Jones’s personality felt like an afterthought for the first half of the book, which sucks because she was mentioned multiple times on every page. Not kidding.
Daisy Jones and the Six deserves a high four-star rating just for the author’s incredible talent, hard-hitting quotes about life and the fact that I shed bountiful amounts of tears by the end over characters I thought I didn’t care about for half the book.
This novel is a must-read.
Thank you, Kiersten, for letting me kidnap your book across state lines.
Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐/5
