I had such high hope from this plot, I was getting all the vibes of a 4/5 star book and then it ended.

I loved Zoe and Joey and their messy relationship, I loved all the early 2000s music references, I love that we know what year it was in Zoë’s life due to the songs that were coming out in the chats. I loved the music nostalgia I felt while reading this book but I just wanted so much more.

Thank you so much to @netgally and Harper Collins for the audio ARC version

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley appeared on paper to be just my kind of book. I have a huge love of music and am considered a millennial so I thought I was the perfect audience for this book. However, something went wrong somewhere along the way and I couldn't connect with this book at all. Had it not been for (gratefully!) receiving a copy on NetGalley, I probably would have DNFd it. It's possible that the format (audio) was not the right format for me for this book. I kept zoning in and out and feel like I missed an awful lot of key parts of the plot, but unfortunately, it didn't grip me enough to make the effort to rewind and re-listen.
I definitely think I just wasn't the right person for this book. While I'm a millennial, I'm on the younger end of it so maybe the nostalgia didn't hit as hard for me? I did love being reminded of some of the hits from that time and I'll definitely be listening to the playsuit created to go with the book. I've seen people raving about this book so I do think it had a niche audience and unfortunately that didn't include me on this occasion. I'm sincerely grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read Deep Cuts as an audiobook.

This book certainly needs no introduction, it is absolutely everywhere at the moment, and rightfully so.

Holly Brickley has nailed her debut novel. There is so much emotion and depth to these characters, I felt like I knew them. Though frustrating, I really enjoyed their complicated and messy relationship. Life and love, especially between friends/colleagues, is chaotic and difficult, and I appreciate how Brickley explored that. So many quotable lines, the cover is top tier, the nostalgia oozes of the page and I am definitely not the only reader anxiously awaiting the news of Brickley's next novel.

Additionally, Jayme Mattler really brought this book to life with their narration. My enjoyment of the novel was 100% enhanced by the audiobook.

Thank you NetGalley and Harper Collins for an ALC of Deep Cuts.

Deep Cuts tells the story of a young woman navigating life, love, and loss, all set against a backdrop of music and memories. It delves into some deep emotions and explores how the past shapes the present.
I listened to this one on audio, and while the story itself eventually drew me in, the narrator wasn't exactly my favourite. It took me a good while to really get into the swing of things with this book.
Once I did, though, I have to say I enjoyed it. The music references sprinkled throughout really kept me there, as a bit of a music fan myself. It added a nice layer to the whole thing.
The thing is, while I enjoyed it in the moment, I'm not entirely sure it's a book that'll stick with me down the line. It was grand, but not unforgettable.

Although I am definitely not the target audience for this book (I think I recognised maybe one artist the author wrote about? And had zero thoughts about the songs themselves…), I liked the way in which the author told the story of two young people through their connections to the said music. This is in a way a very slow burning romance between two characters who make mistakes, try to fix them, fail and then try again. It is not overly sentimental and in Percy’s doubts about her own creative talents the author portrays the way in which many female artists see themselves within the music industry.
I liked the narrator though!

I didn’t enjoy Deep Cuts as much as I hoped I would and certainly don’t agree with any comparisons to Daisy Jones & The Six. To be fair, I don’t feel I was the author’s target audience - too old and too British!

On a positive note, the narrator and audio recording were excellent.

Thank you to NetGalley, HarperCollins UK Audio and Borough Press for the audio ARC of Deep Cuts.

I downloaded this less than 2 weeks ago and was in the middle of 3 books at the time. This morning I have gone to listen to this audiobook from the Netgalley app to find it’s been archived and I can’t listen to it 🙄🙄 so dumb and annoying!

I think I am maybe slightly too young to fully appreciate all the musical references in Deep Cuts however that didn't stop me from enjoying this one! I could still fully appreciate Percy's absolute adoration for music and creativity and I loved her feminine rage surrounding her will-they-wont-they relationship with Joe (who, by the way, I despised). The pace was pretty slow but the emotion was palpable and made this story what it was!
If I had written this, I would have given Percy a different ending I think - but with the ending she was given, I would love to see where she ends up, maybe in a decades time.

It gave me real Daisy Jones & The Six vibes, so if you liked that one then maybe you should give this one a go.

I really enjoyed the audio narration of this. Even though it is performed by a solo narrator she uses a variety of voices to personify the different characters which helped bring the story to life and allow me to immerse myself fully.

3.5⭐️⭐️⭐️



✨ my review is basically okay, not for me but I did try to finish:)
New vibe, different kind of story which I never thought I would read.

✨ relationships,toxicity, somehow this book can be more focus on younger generation.
Feeling nostalgic for millennials .


✨ Thankyou for the opportunity to read this arc for a honest review.


❤️shaye.reads

Even if the topic was exactly what I wanted, the realisation was lacking for me. I felt out of it. The college setting and Percy’s & Joe’s meeting created the lore but nothing was here to level up through the story. Everything was blurred into other characters & relationships. It seemed as if it was without any purpose. Did not had empathy for them and felt lost many times. The music stakes was too low & relationships too distilled. It’s a miss because I didn’t get the point even at the end. Unfortunately, I didn’t found it sad or either redempting.

This story is a deeply passionate love letter to music and the profound connection two individuals share with it, bordering on obsession. It is not a typical romance, but it is full of love, both between the characters and with music. The story is densely packed with references, analysis, and opinions on music through the 90s and 2000s, woven into almost every conversation and anecdote. Anyone looking for a love and coming-of-age(ish) story centered around music might love this, especially if you were a teenager/young adult in the 90s and early 2000s, this book will give you that does of nostalgia. I really appreciated how the characters also felt like real people making real people decisions, meaning they were flawed and not always rational but still, most of the time, made sense to their characters.

It wasn't a perfect book for me though, the biggest gripe being that while I did feel that musical nostalgia at times, the song title and artist references grew to be a bit too much the further we got into the story and that made it lose its charm a little, but all in all a solid read, I would recommend it.

I listened to the audiobook mostly (I did buy the book to follow along for the majority of it though) and liked the narrator, I felt their voice fit the narrator's well and was enjoyable to listen to.

Deep Cuts is an emotionally raw and deeply impactful read. The story carries a weight that’s hitting hard with its intensity and relatability. At times, it feels like a gut punch. While I’m still unsure how I feel about it, one thing is certain: this book leaves an impression. It’s a deeply personal and thought-provoking read that resonates in some rather unexpected ways.

I love music (although not in the deeply analytical way that Percy does 😂) and I like an angsty book, so I had high hopes for Deep Cuts. Mostly, it delivered. I loved the music references, even if I didn’t agree with all of Percy’s observations (Songs in the Key of Life is one of my favourite albums and I won’t hear a bad word said about it!), I found myself hooked from the start, and I thought the pacing was perfect. I also enjoyed how it ended. However, it didn’t hit quite as hard as I would have liked it to (hence a 4⭐️ and not a 5⭐️) and I think that was attributable to Percy and Joe.

I can absolutely get behind an imperfect protagonist and often find that they’re the most interesting characters to follow. Still, Percy wasn’t always the easiest to root for - how can someone who is so critical of others describes cutting bangs as one of the “most subtly powerful decisions of my life.”?! And I had very conflicting feelings about her relationship with Joe (which was, I think, the point, but part of me still would have loved his POV so that I could have understood his motivations). This sentence from Joe really struck me as being very reflective of their relationship:

“Percy, have you ever noticed that talking to most people is boring? Easier than this, but boring.”

Nothing is ever simple with them, yet they can’t help but gravitate towards each other and no one else will ever live up to their ideals (especially Percy’s perspective of Joe).

While I found Percy at times to be immature and self-sabotaging, I did feel like we saw some character growth from her as the story progressed (even if I would have liked to have seen more), and I’m glad we saw the evolution of her relationship with Zoe. I’m not sure that we saw any character growth from Joe, which is another reason I would’ve liked his POV.

While this might sound quite critical of a book I’ve rated 4⭐️, I think that was also part of the beauty of it, that I felt connected enough to the story and the characters (even if I didn’t always like them) to have strong feelings about them.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ALC of this book.

I wanted to love this book (music-driven stories are usually a favourite), but something didn’t quite click. While the nostalgia and insight into songwriting were engaging, the characters left me cold. Percy’s role in the creative process was interesting, but I struggled to connect with her, and the constant miscommunication with Joe felt more frustrating than compelling. Their dynamic never seemed to evolve, making it hard to stay fully invested.

That said, the writing is sharp, the music references hit the right notes, and the audiobook was a highlight. The narrators brought the story to life, adding depth to the emotional beats in a way that made the experience more immersive. I enjoyed parts of it, but it didn’t leave the lasting impact I was hoping for. If you love stories about music and collaboration, it’s still worth checking out - especially in audio format.

This is a story that really leans into the importance of how music makes you feel, what it feels like to find words that someone else has written for your own thoughts and experiences. Some of the musical references were lost on me, but I enjoyed it all the same, and I’ll be searching what I don’t know out!
This book is such a good time capsule for the 00s. Even just the thought of a CD being burned and feeling like you can’t message someone as soon as you see them come online on MSN took me back to such a specific time of my life.
Jayme’s read is wonderful, she brings such a lovely energy and a great tone that felt like such a good match for Percy. It feels like we’re listening to an older, wiser woman recounting her younger days, reflective with a touch of nostalgia, which is where comparison to Daisy Jones & The Six fits best for me. There were also echos of Normal People, so this is one I’d recommend for the music obsessed literary fiction girls.

Deep Cuts embodies the feeling of being young and in love to the point of obsession. At college one fateful evening, Percy is standing at the barspilling all her opinions on music when she looks up to find Joe, who is captivated by her thoughts. The story follows Joe into music fame and Percy as a music lover and writer. Their friendship, love affair,.and co-dependency is almost toxic and certainly intoxicating. The deep delve into music discussions is superb with each chapter headed with a song title. The audiobook doesnt play the music, but would be best enjoyed with its accompanying playlist for full immersion. Music lovers will love this and fans of music literature like Daisy Jones and the Six. A truly captivating audiobook #Deepcuts #hollybrickley #netgalley

Music fans, you need to get this one on your radar! I went into this one expecting a contemporary romance, and whilst there is a complex relationship between Percy and Joe, the true love story is their passion for music.

Whilst some of the music references were too cool for me (I’m stuck on 60s Burt Bacharach and the Jonas Brothers 🙈), I adored all the nostalgic references to bands and songs gone by, and the way those references changed as time passed and the decades changed. I do want to make it clear that this book is very heavy on the music and songwriting element, and the will they won’t they love story feels very much secondary, as I don’t want people going in expecting a romance novel when it just feels so different to that! But I did adore the dynamic between not just Percy and Joe, but also Percy and Zoe, who is Joe’s first girlfriend in the book - their friendship was really unexpected and fun!

This is a very fresh look at what happens when art, ambition and love collide, and I found all the characters really compelling. Whilst I might not recommend it to someone with no interest in music, for anyone else I think it’s a really cool and entertaining read, and I’m looking forward to chatting to Holly about it on the 20th March - keep your eyes peeled for more details!

Joey (Joe) Morrow and Eileen Percy Marks (Percy) meet during college and bond over their shared love for music. Joe is an aspiring musician with his eyes set on the prize, aka a band and a tour, the pinnacle of musical glory in the early 2000s. What Percy thinks she lacks in musical skills, she more than makes up for in her sonic judgement. The result? When Joe wrote a lacklustre song, Percy helped him punch it up and elevated it to an earworm. Her suggestions, as shown, make songs better in a single tectonic shift.

Those scenes — Percy and Joe becoming friends over their musical tastes, riffing and jamming — are a delight to read. Brickley captures the high that comes with generating creative output so well. Fans of singers and songwriters yearn for behind-the-scenes glimpses of their craft. What’s your process like, they wonder. Did you write the lyrics and then the melody, or did you struggle with either? Brickley gives us generous dollops of the process. It’s almost surreal. We feel the adrenaline rush Percy feels as the song falls into place, as their clamour about hooks, bridges, verses becomes coherent. “Songs were always between us like a balloon we’ve been asked to keep afloat,” she says of her collaboration with Joe.

Soon enough, we also feel the hollowness that accompanies this creative fulfilment. Disconcertingly, Percy’s game-changing role as his musical sidekick existed in the shadows, where she received creative satisfaction sans accountability. A young Percy thought, naively, that she was okay with it. The creative satisfaction is enough, so she deludes herself out of a co-writing credit. The dark shadows are where envy and misunderstandings breed.

Percy is a multi-faceted person: we see her dabble in music journalism, we see her walk the music critic tightrope with her witticisms, we see her as a collaborator with incisive insights that “punch up” the songs, among a bunch of other professional roles that don’t even exist anymore. But most importantly, she was wildly ambitious about putting her musical sensibilities to good use, even if she couldn’t be the one performing. Music was her one true love, her escape, her safe space, her comfort… so was there space for another?

Deep Cuts is as much about Percy’s talent as it is about her emotional choices. It’s also a breezy introspection on a favourite question of the noughties: can you sustain a creative collaboration once romantic attraction enters the equation? Can Percy be Joe’s musical soulmate and simultaneously have a fulfilling life outside him? Is Joe prioritising their working relationship over a potential romance, ominous of what awaits her?

The brief flashes we receive into Joe’s life (and his POV) are so endearing we cannot help but root for him, “I want my music to be good. I don’t have any other options. I suck at everything else.” He does the grunt work of building the band. He takes on the risk. He deals with a sour, former band member. We know he’s worked hard to reach that stage, but he could not have done this without Percy. Both of these things can be true at once. Joe could have so easily become the tortured musician archetype, but Brickley gave a multi-dimensional character, and it made me love these characters individually as much as I relished their dynamic with each other.

There’s also Zoe, Joe’s former girlfriend (a confusing relationship, since she’s a lesbian), who grows closer to Percy and fades in and out of the duo’s lives over the years. Percy values her friendship, and Zoe becomes the connecting link between her and Joe in the more uncommunicative years of their lives.

***
Deep Cuts are the more obscure titles in a musician’s biography. They constitute the sweet spot of a musician’s oeuvre where only superfans and music aficionados take shelter. Holly Brickley’s protagonist, Percy, accords this term her own definition, “I personally like to pretend the phrase “deep cut” has a totally different meaning, one that has nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion. How deep does it cut? How close to the bone? How long do you feel it?”

It’s an easter egg for how the reader should devour this book, too. For all this talk about depth, the story operates on tangible surfaces. How much you want to feel is upto you, which is a good thing, for the book isn’t bogged down by the pretension of being something it’s not. It’s a breezy read, but not a single scene exists without purpose, and not a single editorial call is made without a callback. How strongly do you want to feel the highs and the lows (despite what the overall context of the book suggests, there are some unpalatable experiences woven in, once again, in the manner of the era: character-defining, but unacknowledged beyond the event)?

The novel’s emotional depth matches its cultural resonance. The book is a cultural time capsule: Percy’s career choices scream the early 2000s, each chapter title is a nostalgic nod, and the deep dives into music cement the era’s atmosphere. There’s lots of nostalgia for the music of the noughties: Beach Boys, Green Day, Bowie, Neutral Milk Hotel…you get the drift.

There’s a certain simplicity to the book’s core: you cannot extricate the art you create from the love you feel, your creative output into the world is defined by what the world gives you. The joy of reading this story is also the pain: in an era devoid of smartphones and damning attention spans, we perhaps got second chances and valued them, a fading feeling in the age of swiping and scrolling.

Some excellent one-liners and zingers made it a lovely, memorable, quick read. Think, “Memories are vague on context” or “Joe saw me clearly the way some people can look at an abstract painting and instantly discern a figure.” Or, my favourite, “How do you tell people you’ve only known a few months that they are your best friends without sounding pathetic?” Some vulnerabilities travel through the time-space continuum.

Deep Cuts is the kind of story meant to be adapted to the screen, and I can already envisage a comfort watch coming our way. The book has all the soft parts of some recent favourite books: the musical landscape similar to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, the coming-of-age sentiment of Lily King’s Writers and Lovers, the second chance trope like Elissa Sussman’s Funny You Should Ask, the complicated dynamic of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, and Zoe’s existence in the trio reminiscent of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

Deep Cuts is more than just a love letter to the early 2000s music scene. It’s about the songs and the production as much as it is about the subcultures spawned by that music, the obsessions and coming-of-age experiences of those who found solace in music while living through world-changing events, from 9/11 to the recession. The only constant? Music as a means of self-expression, an escape that envelopes you even as you stand at the edge of the world.

I originally read the ebook ARC first, staying up 'til past 1am to finish this short but dense love letter to music that had me ruminating on long after I finished reading. I felt fully immersed as it captures Percy, Joe and Zoe spending their 20s as the hopefulness of 2000 gives way to the post 9/11 world that hurtles towards the 2008 GFC. I loved all the deep dives into songs which I subsquently listened to while reading (The Knife's beautifully haunting Heartbeats has now been in my head all day).

As an audiobook, Jayme Mattler was the perfect narration choice. While she did sound a bit older than 20something Percy, I think she still had the right vocal tones and energy to make bring this book to life that enhanced my reading experience.

The romance is a raw, messy, co-dependent, push/pull, break each other's hearts experience. Unfortunately, this was the weakest part of the book that I wish Brickley delved deeper. Joe is the typical male musician who pushes away Percy first to enjoy the groupie life, using the excuse he'd 'mess it up', but then wants her so she can fix songs. The book needed to see Joe grow during their estrangement where he acknowledges his behaviour and has proven he's changed and is fully 'all in'. A real shame because what should've been a high note felt a bit flat.

Thanks to HarperCollins UK/The Borough Press and NetGalley for the ALC.

Thank you Harper Collins UK Audio, Borough Press and NetGalley for the ALC.

Deep Cuts is a fiction book set through the 2000s with elements of romance, focused entirely around music.
Any book compared to Daisy Jones & the Six will instantly draw me in, but they've never lived up to that comparison. I would say this book is more comparable to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow with the messy on-again-off-again relationship tangled through their passion for music and working life. To me, the more compelling relationship was Percy's friendship with Zoe.

Perfect for music lovers, the references littered throughout this novel were incredible for anyone growing up during this time. I was surprised to discover this is an authors debut and look forward to reading more from Holly Brickley in the future.
Incredibly written and well narrated. I think a lot of people will truly enjoy this story.