Review: Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley

 

Publication Date: February 2025

Publisher: Crown

Source: Borrowed from Library (Goodreads)

Blurb: 

Look, the song whispered to me, that day in my living room. Life can be so big.

It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy—who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it—can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night.

Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?

I picked up this book solely because I heard it was being made into a movie at some point with a stacked cast.. not sure if that is still going ahead as I haven't seen any updates but this was definitely a book that disappointed me. 

I had seen people comparing this book to Normal People and One Day - both of which I loved, so I had some high expectations going in which were ultimately not met by the book. 

To start on a positive note, I thought the characters were really realistic and while they were completely self-pitying and pretentious I did feel they were true reflections of the type of people you meet in college who believe they know everything about one topic (music) and think all other opinions are invalid. I think I enjoyed reading about some of the side characters more than the main characters at times as the constant music chat going on for paragraph after paragraph did begin to grate on me and I found myself skimming over those parts to get back to wondering more about the "will they won't they" aspect of the story. 

I didn't find myself bored at any point reading the book, though it was definitely not a gripping read I was looking forward to picking up each evening. It turned out to be just an okay read for me with a very disappointing anti-climactic ending. Kinda like a digestive biscuit, plain and okay but there are other biscuits out there that are tastier. 

A reviewer said that they thought book would have been 90% more enjoyable if it was 10% gayer and I completely agree. There was a hint towards something in the storyline that then felt rushed and shoved off to the side. 

An okay read that was enjoyable at times, the music monologuing for me was too much, but I won't be rushing out to buy Brickley's next book.