by Taylor Jenkins Reid
4.5 · 4 reviewsThey sold out arenas and then walked away at the top. Decades later, the band finally tells you why — one contradicting memory at a time.
In the sun-baked, smoke-and-vinyl world of 1970s Los Angeles, a scrappy rock outfit called The Six is clawing toward something bigger when a magnetic, untamable singer named Daisy Jones collides with their orbit. What follows is the kind of partnership that makes legends: electric harmonies, sold-out shows, and a chart-topping record that defines a generation — alongside the kind of friction that can only come from two people who want the same spotlight and can't decide whether they love or resent each other for it.
Told entirely as a transcribed oral history, the novel stitches together the band members' own recollections years after their abrupt and infamous breakup. Each voice remembers the rise, the romances, the creative wars, and that final night differently, and the gaps between their stories are where the real heat lives. Daisy and frontman Billy Dunne anchor a cast of musicians, spouses, and hangers-on all reckoning with ambition, addiction, and the cost of chasing a sound nobody can quite let go.
It's a book about the songs we make to survive each other, and the truths we edit out when we finally sit down to explain ourselves. Why did the biggest band of their moment vanish at their peak? Everyone has an answer. Almost no two of them match.
First published in 2019.
4 reviews
Came in skeptical because of the hype and left mostly won over. The format takes a few pages to click but once it does you fly through it. The ending hit harder than I thought a book this breezy could.
The voice-driven structure is genuinely clever and the pacing never sags. A few of the secondary band members blur together and I wished the actual music felt as deep as the drama around it. Still a very easy four stars and a great vacation read.
The interview format had me convinced this was a real band I'd somehow never heard of. By the second half I was Googling the album track list before remembering none of it exists. Daisy is one of the best characters I've read in years.
I'm not usually a music person but the tension between Daisy and Billy is so good it didn't matter. The unreliable narration is the whole point and it pays off beautifully. Wanted to start over the second I finished.