BOOK REVIEW: DAISY JONES & THE SIX BY TAYLOR JENKINS REID

NOT SPOILER FREE

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid is certainly a book that seems to have shaken the world. It has gone down a storm, with Reese Witherspoon buying the rights to the story and a TV show in the works within a year of its initial release. I dived head first into the hype and decided take on the book for myself. It's safe to say I had incredibly high expectations. Did Daisy Jones & The Six live up to them? Absolutely.

The real magic to this book was how Reid somehow makes you feel like this band is already present in the depths of your brain. She makes them seem as real as The Stones or Fleetwood Mac (whom the story is loosely based on). Everything about the characters she creates and prevents seems familiar. It's a very special talent for an author to make you feel like you already knew the characters before the book even begins, but Reid achieves this perfectly. The dedication to this familiarity isis astounding, with Reid even including the lyrics to the completely fictional DJATS hit album 'Aurora' in the back of the book. She doesn't want the story to be fantasy, she wants it to be real, and Reid achieves this impeccably.

The character of Daisy Jones is one that we all know of and exists in both the pop culture of the 70s and of the present day: the pretty girl with a sad life and a habit for taking everything and anything to make herself feel alive again. In a world where Instagram shows us the best of these girl's lives, Reid takes it upon herself to make us see the worst. There are moments of power and badassery Reid inserts into Daisy Jones' narrative, but these get covered by her addiction to drugs, alcohol and the feeling of sadness itself. The fact that we see these glimmers of hope, of someone who has some sort of energy within her makes the reader absolutely root for the character despite her reckless tendencies.

However, it is the character of Billy that really took my breathe away within the novel. The more I thought about it after I finished it, the more I realised that the story was never really about Daisy, it was moreso about Billy; the lead singer and guitarist of The Six. With Billy's struggle at the centre of the book, it was very clever for Reid to bring Diasy in as a character who represented everuthing that he was trying to escape from; at that made the love-to-hate and hate-to-love relationship of the pair all the more heartbreaking. It was more than a will-they won't-they between two characters, it was a will-they won't-they between the concepts of strength of weakness, sobriety and rock 'n' roll, one kind of love and another.

And much like the audiences of the band and the media within the story itself; you get yourself so drawn into the story of Billy and Daisy that you don't even particularly notice what the background characters are going through until, for want of a better way of putting it, shit hits the fan. The band that Reid has created is completely multi-dimensional, so even if you don't like one storyline, you could continue reading for another. So many aspects contribute to the fall of DJATS, and you don't even realise it until it's completely broken. The fall of the band compares to the narrative of the book itself: you don't even realise who the story is really and truly about until the novel is over.

The ending, for me, was particularly exceptional because, quite frankly, of it's ordinariness. There was no big dramatic ending, nothing over the top or extravagant. Just people realising that they just can't do this anymore. Reid could have easily ruined the reality-feeling by having an over-dramatised ending but she didn't; she just presented six people unable to do what they've done for the past couple years any longer, for various reasons. It's this moment of mundaneness in the ending that makes the story feel all the more real. It just ends, and you look back and realise you were focused on all the completely wrong things throughout; just like real life.

Although the story is on the surface just about the history of the band, the underneath is so much more than that. It was so subtle and genius that it didn't make the book seem heavy, but had me thinking about everything for at least 24 hours after I finished it.

Overall, Daisy Jones & The Six is a fantastic read and I'd absolutely recommend it. I really hope the novel takes off even more and becomes a staple of pop culture this year, which I imagine it will with it's TV show and fully recorded album on the way. It perfectly encompasses the retrospective view we have on the world at the moment, with the rise of the 60s, 70s, and 80s well underway. I'll be keeping my eyes peeled.

RATING: 5/5!

I have also compiled a playlist of songs, from the 1960s all the way 2018, that I believe go exceptionally well with Daisy Jones and The Six. Check it out below!

Written by Ruby Crowhurst