Review by New York Times Review
The '70S are back, apparently. Elton John, Cher and Fleetwood Mac are on world tours. Marie Claire magazine recently argued that the 1970s were "the best fashion decade" with a sequin-and-paisley slide show that included Diana Ross, Debbie Harry, John Travolta and the Osmonds (?!). And in the first "Saturday Night Live" episode of 2019, the retro-rock band Greta Van Fleet appeared on stage looking like the tasseled, psychedelic love children of Yoko Ono and David Bowie. On Weekend Update, the joke was that their name was actually Super Blood Wolf Moon. Our love for the '70s, equal parts homage and satire, is inseparable from the bell-bottomed music scene of that decade. Taylor Reid Jenkins has written a stylish and propulsive if sometimes sentimental novel set against that backdrop, in the stadiums, studios and pool houses of late-1970s L.A. Though the back cover suggests that "everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six," the book is the story of a fake band in a real world. "Daisy Jones & The Six" is a fairly earnest portrait of the '70s, though, a mockumentary without the mocking. It begins as two stories: that of Daisy Jones, the bangle-wearing, hard-partying young singer-songwriter whose beauty is as powerful as her voice, and that of Billy Dunne, the denim-wearing, hard-partying young guitarist and frontman for the rising rock band The Six. Daisy has recorded a semisuccessful solo album of other people's music, but she wants to write her own songs. Although she drifts in and out of the beds of men she meets on the road, her most reliable romance is with the pills rattling in her pockets. Billy has his own brush with the excesses of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Not long after his pregnant wife, Camila, finds him in a compromising position on the tour bus, he comes home and checks into rehab, swearing sobriety and loyalty to his family. Then a prophetic manager plays Cupid, suggesting that Billy and Daisy try a duet on The Six's second album. The band members - Billy, his brother Graham, Karen, Warren, Eddie and Pete - aren't thrilled. They resist the decade's slide into soft rock. But once the duet, "Honeycomb," becomes The Six's biggest hit, the only choice is to invite Daisy to join the band. And sure enough, Daisy and Billy enter a love-hate friendship fraught with a will-they-or-won't-they sexual tension that makes for some of the strongest pages in the book. Even the photographer for the cover of "Aurora," their third album, feels it: "They were angled in, and there was so much ... the negative space between them felt... alive somehow. Electric. There was so much purpose behind the not touching, right?" Romance is Reid's calling card. Her first four books, including "Forever, Interrupted" and "After I Do," are first-person, voice-driven novels narrated by women somewhere between heartbroken and madly in love. In her fifth and most recent, "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo," she began to approach the terrain of "Daisy Jones & The Six," presenting another famous figure - this time a film star - telling her love story to the narrator, a journalist. It's a pleasure, then, to see Reid tweaking her own formula in "Daisy Jones & The Six" while also leaning on her strength, the love story. Narratively speaking, this is easily her most sophisticated and ambitious novel. Which is not to say that all of its risks pay off. Where this book departs from Reid's others - and from most rock novels - is in its unconventional structure. Presented almost entirely as an oral history, the novel reads like the transcript of a particularly juicy episode of VHl's "Behind the Music." In the brief author's note at the beginning, the author - Reid? someone else? who? - explains, "This book serves as the first and only time members of the band have commented on their history together." The mystery author has collected the voices of The Six, Daisy, their manager, music critics and others in a kind of monologue mix tape. And this device works surprisingly well. If we can forget for a minute the question of just who this "as told to" is being told to, it's easy to fall under the musical spell of these voices, which shift fluidly from speaker to speaker as the characters hand off the microphone. Reid has a great ear, both for the way people talk in interviews and for the music they describe, as when Billy is explaining the B-side of "Aurora": '"Young Stars' is tortured but up-tempo, it's a little dangerous but you can dance to it. And then you go right into 'Regret Me,' which is hard and fast and raw. And then come down off it with 'Midnights,' which gets a little sweeter. You lead into 'A Hope Like You.' Slow, and tender and wistful and spartan. ... And then, you know, the sun comes up at the end. You leave on the high note. You go out with a bang. 'Aurora.' Sprawling and lush and percussive." But while it makes for a heady journey through the band's ascent, the script format inherently limits our access to the characters' innermost selves. The camera is locked on a tripod, the interviewees confessing their greatest fears and loves in the same shoulders-up shot for much of the novel. After a while, we long to get closer, to hear what the characters aren't confessing on the record, or to zoom out, to take in more of the decade than its miniature backstage dramas. When only the characters narrate the story, their reminiscences can fall flat. "It is what I have always loved about music," Daisy says. "Not the sounds or the crowds or the good times as much as the words - the emotions, and the stories, the truth - that you can let flow right out of your mouth. Music can dig, you know?" Moments like these are a little cheesy, but maybe that's the point? I felt the same way reading Daisy and Billy's lyrics, which perfectly channel the cringey, soulful, notquite-brilliant but damn-catchy lines of every pop song written in the 1970s. Reid is so good at them that she's written a whole album of lyrics, which is included at the back of the book ("But maybe I should stake my claim / Maybe I should claim my stake / I've heard some hopes are worth the break"). It was these songs that convinced me that Reid could see her subject with some critical distance, that for every pastel Polaroid in the book, there's another moment that is, if not making fun, at least having fun. And here is the ironic thing: It's at that moment that we start to let our guard down. Maybe we download Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours." We can't help singing along. We think: Wow, O.K., it's really good. We start to feel the feelings of Daisy and Billy, and we forget the nagging question about who is telling this story anyway? And when we finally find out, we might cry a few unironic tears. In the end, that's the most surprising gift of "Daisy Jones & The Six" - it's a way to love the rock 'n' roll of the 1970s, without apology, without cynicism, bell-bottoms and all. The novel feels like a particularly juicy episode of VHl's 'Behind the Music.' ELEANOR HENDERSON is the author ofthe novels "Ten Thousand Saints" and "The Twelve-Mile Straight."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Daisy Jones and the Six was the hottest rock band of the seventies; the sexy voice of Daisy Jones and the pleading tones of Billy Dunne were the soundtrack to countless sweltering summer nights. Yet fans had no idea of the chaos behind the curtain. Daisy and Billy, oozing raw attraction on stage, couldn't even look at each other as they walked off. When she wasn't singing or writing songs, wild child Daisy was popping pills. Billy's addiction was alcohol, until he met Camila and discovered a whole new kind of dependence. Graham, Eddie, and Warren loved the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, but Karen and Pete had other things on their minds. Framed as a tell-all biography compiled through interviews and articles, Reid's (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, 2017) novel so resembles a memoir of a real band and conjures such true-to-life images of the seventies music scene that readers will think they're listening to Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin. Reid is unsurpassed in her ability to create complex characters working through emotions that will make your toes curl. HIGH-DEMAND BACK STORY: Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine is producing a 13-episode series for Amazon. Order accordingly.--Tracy Babiasz Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo) delivers a stunning story of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll in the 1960s and '70s in this expertly wrought novel. Mimicking the style and substance of a tell-all celebrity memoir, the book is narrated by a character whose identity is a secret until the end. The central figure, free-spirited yet distinctly complicated Daisy Jones, grows up as the daughter of a famous artist and a French model, crashing her 14-year-old underage self into clubs on L.A.'s Sunset Strip and, increasingly, consuming large quantities of both legal and illegal drugs. When she finds her forte in singing and songwriting, Daisy's world changes. Signed to Runner Records, she soon meets labelmate and tortured singer-songwriter Billy Dunne. Billy goes from not wanting Daisy in his band to writing some of their biggest hits with her, and their chemistry is explosive. But Billy nearly ruined his marriage to true love Camila by being unfaithful, drinking, and drugging, and he won't throw away his second chance with her-although he tries to get Daisy into recovery, as he sees her heading down the same dark path that he went down. Add in a colorful cast of backup musicians, all of whom have their own demons (particularly Billy's overshadowed brother, Graham, and his on-again, off-again girlfriend and bandmate, Karen), and Reid creates both story line and character gold. The book's prose is propulsive, original, and often raw. Readers will accept and appreciate why and when the narrator's identity is finally revealed. Reid's gift for creating imperfect characters and taut plots courses throughout this addictive novel. Agent: Theresa Park, Park Literary & Media. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Daisy Jones was the "it girl" of the 1970s rock-and-roll scene, gifted but unpolished. She couldn't finish a single song on her own and behaved as though she loved the lifestyle more than the music, making her as dangerous as she was beautiful. Billy Dunne was the dynamic frontman of the Six, a struggling addict who was desperate to prove himself to his wife and kids. They were talented apart and explosive together. While delivering intricate and impassioned story lines for all band members, this novel centers on how the partnership, chemistry, hostility, and love shared by Daisy and Billy shot the group straight to the top of charts, until their strained relationship ultimately ended the band. Told decades later through pieced-together interviews, the story is filtered through nostalgia. The narrative's presentation and the emotional, raw way the characters recall their glory days will make readers question if the band is really fictional. VERDICT This latest from Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo) is for music lovers, romance fans, and anyone who wants to feel invincible with youth, intoxicated by music, and a powerful longing for days gone by. [See Prepub Alert, 10/1/18; also check out the Spotify playlist and forthcoming -Amazon Video web-based miniseries.-Ed.]-Heidi Uphoff, Albuquerque, NM © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
What ever happened to Daisy Jones and The Six, the iconic 1970s rock band that topped the charts and sold out stadiums? It's always been a mystery why the musicians suddenly disbanded.Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, 2017, etc.) takes an unusual approach to dissecting the breakup of the fictional rock band by offering a narrative composed solely of transcribed interviews. At the center of the documentary-style novel is the relationship between lead singer Billy Dunne, recovering addict and aspiring family man, and sexy bad girl Daisy Jones, whose soulful voice and complex lyrics turn out to have been the missing ingredient The Six needed. When Daisy joins the band, the group catapults to fame, but not without cost. She refuses to simply fall in line and let Billy make the artistic decisions. In doing this, not only does she infuriate the band leader, she also sets an example for other members who are only too happy to start voicing their own demands. Over time the tension between Billy and Daisy grows increasingly more complicated, threatening to take its toll on Billy's home life. He is fiercely loyal to his wife, Camila, while also being fully cognizant of his weaknessesa torturous combination for Billy. Other band members have their own embroilments, and Daisy's bestie, disco diva Simone Jackson, enhances the cast, but the crux of the story is about how the addition of Daisy to The Six forever changes the chemistry of the band, for better and worse. There is great buildup around answering the big question of what happened at their final concert together, though the revelation is a letdown. Further, the documentary-style writing detracts from the storytelling; it often feels gimmicky, as though the author is trying too hard for a fresh and clever approach. This is a shame because her past novels, traditionally told, have been far more engaging.Despite some drawbacks, an insightful story that will appeal to readers nostalgic for the 1970s. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
