Genre Fiction
![Taylor Jenkins Reid - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B00DX8B85M.jpg)
Daisy Jones & The Six: A Novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous breakup-from the author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and the new novel Malibu Rising, available now!
REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK • IN DEVELOPMENT AS AN ORIGINAL STREAMING SERIES EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY REESE WITHERSPOON
"An explosive, dynamite, down-and-dirty look at a fictional rock band told in an interview style that gives it irresistible surface energy."-Elin Hilderbrand
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The Washington Post • Esquire • Glamour • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping • Marie Claire • Parade • Paste • Shelf Awareness • BookRiot
Everyone knows DAISY JONES & THE SIX, but nobody knows the reason behind their 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 '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.
REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK • IN DEVELOPMENT AS AN ORIGINAL STREAMING SERIES EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY REESE WITHERSPOON
"An explosive, dynamite, down-and-dirty look at a fictional rock band told in an interview style that gives it irresistible surface energy."-Elin Hilderbrand
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The Washington Post • Esquire • Glamour • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping • Marie Claire • Parade • Paste • Shelf Awareness • BookRiot
Everyone knows DAISY JONES & THE SIX, but nobody knows the reason behind their 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 '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.
Editorial Reviews
"I devoured Daisy Jones & The Six in a day, falling head over heels for it. Taylor Jenkins Reid transported me into the magic of the '70s music scene in a way I'll never forget. The characters are beautifully layered and complex. Daisy and the band captured my heart, and they're sure to capture yours, too."-Reese Witherspoon
"Backstage intrigue is the engine of Daisy Jones & The Six. . . . [A] celebration of American mythmaking."-Vogue
"Each character is compelling but Daisy Jones is the star. She's a blazing talent who is unapologetic in her sexuality and lives life on her own terms. . . . Like a poignant song with lyrics that speak to your soul, Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid will transport you to another place and time."-Associated Press
"Reid's wit and gift for telling a perfectly paced story make this one of the most enjoyably readable books of the year."-Nylon
"Wildly delicious." -Entertainment Weekly
"This stylish and propulsive novel, presented in the form of an oral history, explores the ascent of a (fictional) hard-partying, iconic 1970s rock band. It reads like the transcript of a particularly juicy episode of VH1's ‘Behind the Music.'"-The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"Daisy Jones & The Six is just plain fun from cover to cover. . . . Her characters feel so vividly real, you'll wish you could stream their albums, YouTube their concerts, and google their wildest moments to see them for yourself."-HelloGiggles
"[A] juicy tell-all-style page-turner."-Bustle
"Evocative . . . brilliant."-Romper
"Prepare to fall for Taylor Jenkins Reid's newest novel, Daisy Jones & The Six."-PopSugar
"Reid's 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."-Booklist (starred review)
"Reid 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 . . . Reid creates both story line and character gold. The book's prose is propulsive, original, and often raw."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Reid is a stunning writer whose characters are unforgettable and whose sto...
"Backstage intrigue is the engine of Daisy Jones & The Six. . . . [A] celebration of American mythmaking."-Vogue
"Each character is compelling but Daisy Jones is the star. She's a blazing talent who is unapologetic in her sexuality and lives life on her own terms. . . . Like a poignant song with lyrics that speak to your soul, Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid will transport you to another place and time."-Associated Press
"Reid's wit and gift for telling a perfectly paced story make this one of the most enjoyably readable books of the year."-Nylon
"Wildly delicious." -Entertainment Weekly
"This stylish and propulsive novel, presented in the form of an oral history, explores the ascent of a (fictional) hard-partying, iconic 1970s rock band. It reads like the transcript of a particularly juicy episode of VH1's ‘Behind the Music.'"-The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"Daisy Jones & The Six is just plain fun from cover to cover. . . . Her characters feel so vividly real, you'll wish you could stream their albums, YouTube their concerts, and google their wildest moments to see them for yourself."-HelloGiggles
"[A] juicy tell-all-style page-turner."-Bustle
"Evocative . . . brilliant."-Romper
"Prepare to fall for Taylor Jenkins Reid's newest novel, Daisy Jones & The Six."-PopSugar
"Reid's 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."-Booklist (starred review)
"Reid 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 . . . Reid creates both story line and character gold. The book's prose is propulsive, original, and often raw."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Reid is a stunning writer whose characters are unforgettable and whose sto...
Readers Top Reviews
Ryder
This tedious, uninspired novel manages to take sex, drugs and rock n roll and somehow make them deepply uninteresting. There isn't a plot. Take four or five seconds to imagine a pretty girl joining a band and there, you've already imagined all the nuances that this book has to offer. There isn't any interesting writing to speak of - in fact, the interview style becomes grinding after a few pages, let alone several hundred pages of scarcely-drawn characters who all have the same voice. The most telling detail of the quality within these pages is the glowing review on the back cover from noted literary critic and public intellectual Edith Bowman, who notes, "I thought all the characters were real." That is presumably to be taken literally and says all that we need to know about the target audience, given that poor old Edith once struggled to understand the complex metaphor at the heart of Rhianna's "Umbrella", moaning, "Why would she offer someone to stand under her umbrella? It just doesn't make sense!" This isn't literature, it isn't fun and it isn't entertaining.
MrMad, Bad, Dangerou
I like a good rock biography (fictional or real), but this, sadly, isn’t one. It’s not bad, but it definitely isn’t good, being unevenly paced, unconvincing, and pretty 2d. If you want a much better fictional rock biog, try Iain Banks’ Espedair Street. Now that’s *superb*
Tabitha RyderMarnieL
I liked the interview format, though I didn't expect it to work when I first started reading. The characters were very much stereotypes, however, and that made the book much less enjoyable, or rather much more forgettable, once I had finished. {MILD--OR MAYBE METAPHORIC--SPOILERS} There is a handsome guy, talented, a little tortured and brooding. Romance staple, in other words. There's the (pretty much impossibly) Good Wife. She's so good, it makes the back of my teeth ache. Good, good, good. A bit sanctimonious, as Good Wives are wont to be. We have no idea what she does while her guy is out wooing the world as a rock star. Except having babies, and keeping the home fires burning. Good Wife, as I said. And there is the star of the book, the Sexy Bad Girl. Also tortured, given to excess, too beautiful, too talented, too selfish. Do you want to know how this all ends? Ever read The Odyssey? Odysseus almost gets eaten by Sirens, but lashes himself to the mast of his ship so that he won't be lured to his death by their Deadly Song. Aeneas almost gives up his career as the Founder of Rome because Queen Dido was so hot and alluring. But in the end, he married a Good Wife, and left Dido by the side of the road--I mean the side of North Africa. My point is that this is an old, old story--wicked sexually excessive woman vs Good Wife, struggling for the soul of a decent but weak guy. Okay, Daisy isn't wicked, but she's drug addicted, self-involved, and mostly impossible to deal with. All that said, it's a fun read. I have heard they may be making this into a movie, and I think that would be a shame. Movies in which actors try to act like rock stars always fall flat, to me, at least. Maybe I saw too many live shows in my youth. I think it's hard to make a "fake rock band" seem real--and that goes for the book a bit, too. I get the Fleetwood Mac analogy (Karen, the Christine MacVie analogue, was in fact my favorite character), but it was hard to imagine The Six having anything like the power and energy of that band at its peak. That said, one really did want to hear these songs while reading about them, to see Daisy and Billy on stage, so maybe with the right casting... Anyway, the upshot for me was this was a good beach read with some unfortunate and tired assumptions about women. I'm not a radical feminist, so I can still enjoy the book. But I wish it hadn't been quite so reliant on mythic stereotypes. My advice: if that kind of story doesn't bug you, read it anyway. It's a nice afternoon's recreation.
Short Excerpt Teaser
The Groupie
Daisy
Jones
1965–1972
Daisy Jones was born in 1951 and grew up in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, California. The daughter of Frank Jones, the well-known British painter, and Jeanne LeFevre, a French model, Daisy started to make a name for herself in the late sixties as a young teenager on the Sunset Strip.
Elaine Chang (biographer, author of Daisy Jones: Wild Flower): Here is what is so captivating about Daisy Jones even before she was "Daisy Jones."
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. No siblings, no extended family in Los Angeles. Two parents who are so into their own world that they are all but indifferent to her existence. Although, they never shy away from making her pose for their artist friends. That's why there are so many paintings and photos of Daisy as a child-the artists that came into that home saw Daisy Jones, saw how gorgeous she was, and wanted to capture her. It's telling that there is no Frank Jones piece of Daisy. Her father is too busy with his male nudes to pay much attention to his daughter. And in general, Daisy spends her childhood rather alone.
But she's actually a very gregarious, outgoing kid-Daisy would often ask to get her hair cut just because she loved her hairdresser, she would ask neighbors if she could walk their dogs, there was even a family joke about the time Daisy tried to bake a birthday cake for the mailman. So this is a girl that desperately wants to connect. But there's no one in her life who is truly interested in who she is, especially not her parents. And it really breaks her. But it is also how she grows up to become an icon.
We love broken, beautiful people. And it doesn't get much more obviously broken and more classically beautiful than Daisy Jones.
So it makes sense that Daisy starts to find herself on the Sunset Strip. This glamorous, seedy place.
Daisy Jones (singer, Daisy Jones & The Six): I could walk down to the Strip from my house. I was about fourteen, sick of being stuck in the house, just looking for something to do. I wasn't old enough to get into any of the bars and clubs but I went anyway.
I remember bumming a cigarette off of a roadie for the Byrds when I was pretty young. I learned quickly that people thought you were older if you didn't wear your bra. And sometimes I'd wear a bandanna headband like the cool girls had on. I wanted to fit in with the groupies on the sidewalk, with their joints and their flasks and all of that.
So I bummed a cigarette from this roadie outside the Whisky a Go Go one night-the first time I'd ever had one and I tried to pretend I did it all the time. I held the cough in my throat and what have you-and I was flirting with him the best I could. I'm embarrassed to think about it now, how clumsy I probably was.
But eventually, some guy comes up to the roadie and says, "We gotta get inside and set up the amps." And he turns to me and says, "You coming?" And that's how I snuck into the Whisky for the first time.
I stayed out that night until three or four in the morning. I'd never done anything like that before. But suddenly it was like I existed. I was a part of something. I went from zero to sixty that night. I was drinking and smoking anything anybody would give me.
When I got home, I walked in through the front door, drunk and stoned, and crashed in my bed. I'm pretty sure my parents never even noticed I was gone.
I got up, went out the next night, did the same thing.
Eventually, the bouncers on the Strip recognized me and let me in wherever I was going. The Whisky, London Fog, the Riot House. No one cared how young I was.
Greg McGuinness (former concierge, the Continental Hyatt House): Ah, man, I don't know how long Daisy was hanging around the Hyatt House before I noticed her. But I remember the first time I saw her. I was on the phone and in walks this crazy tall, crazy skinny girl with these bangs. And the biggest, roundest blue eyes you ever saw in your life, man. She also had this smile. Huge smile. She came in on the arm of some guy. I don't remember who.
A l...
Daisy
Jones
1965–1972
Daisy Jones was born in 1951 and grew up in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, California. The daughter of Frank Jones, the well-known British painter, and Jeanne LeFevre, a French model, Daisy started to make a name for herself in the late sixties as a young teenager on the Sunset Strip.
Elaine Chang (biographer, author of Daisy Jones: Wild Flower): Here is what is so captivating about Daisy Jones even before she was "Daisy Jones."
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. No siblings, no extended family in Los Angeles. Two parents who are so into their own world that they are all but indifferent to her existence. Although, they never shy away from making her pose for their artist friends. That's why there are so many paintings and photos of Daisy as a child-the artists that came into that home saw Daisy Jones, saw how gorgeous she was, and wanted to capture her. It's telling that there is no Frank Jones piece of Daisy. Her father is too busy with his male nudes to pay much attention to his daughter. And in general, Daisy spends her childhood rather alone.
But she's actually a very gregarious, outgoing kid-Daisy would often ask to get her hair cut just because she loved her hairdresser, she would ask neighbors if she could walk their dogs, there was even a family joke about the time Daisy tried to bake a birthday cake for the mailman. So this is a girl that desperately wants to connect. But there's no one in her life who is truly interested in who she is, especially not her parents. And it really breaks her. But it is also how she grows up to become an icon.
We love broken, beautiful people. And it doesn't get much more obviously broken and more classically beautiful than Daisy Jones.
So it makes sense that Daisy starts to find herself on the Sunset Strip. This glamorous, seedy place.
Daisy Jones (singer, Daisy Jones & The Six): I could walk down to the Strip from my house. I was about fourteen, sick of being stuck in the house, just looking for something to do. I wasn't old enough to get into any of the bars and clubs but I went anyway.
I remember bumming a cigarette off of a roadie for the Byrds when I was pretty young. I learned quickly that people thought you were older if you didn't wear your bra. And sometimes I'd wear a bandanna headband like the cool girls had on. I wanted to fit in with the groupies on the sidewalk, with their joints and their flasks and all of that.
So I bummed a cigarette from this roadie outside the Whisky a Go Go one night-the first time I'd ever had one and I tried to pretend I did it all the time. I held the cough in my throat and what have you-and I was flirting with him the best I could. I'm embarrassed to think about it now, how clumsy I probably was.
But eventually, some guy comes up to the roadie and says, "We gotta get inside and set up the amps." And he turns to me and says, "You coming?" And that's how I snuck into the Whisky for the first time.
I stayed out that night until three or four in the morning. I'd never done anything like that before. But suddenly it was like I existed. I was a part of something. I went from zero to sixty that night. I was drinking and smoking anything anybody would give me.
When I got home, I walked in through the front door, drunk and stoned, and crashed in my bed. I'm pretty sure my parents never even noticed I was gone.
I got up, went out the next night, did the same thing.
Eventually, the bouncers on the Strip recognized me and let me in wherever I was going. The Whisky, London Fog, the Riot House. No one cared how young I was.
Greg McGuinness (former concierge, the Continental Hyatt House): Ah, man, I don't know how long Daisy was hanging around the Hyatt House before I noticed her. But I remember the first time I saw her. I was on the phone and in walks this crazy tall, crazy skinny girl with these bangs. And the biggest, roundest blue eyes you ever saw in your life, man. She also had this smile. Huge smile. She came in on the arm of some guy. I don't remember who.
A l...
