Book Review: Deep Cuts

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?

Deep Cuts, the debut novel by Holly Brickley, will be published on February 25, 2025. Crown Publishing provided an early galley for review.

When a book is about music, whether fiction or nonfiction, I definitely am interested. That's what drew me to this novel.

Right off the bat, I like the touch of the chapter titles being song titles. It can always give me an insight into an author by the titles chosen. They can't be random; they have to be meaningful. Some are existing songs while some are songs written by the character Joe in the novel. So, in this instance, it is different from any usage of this technique that I have encountered before. There is a link on the book's website to a Spotify playlist of the real-world tracks.

Brickley has penned a character-driven tale here; it is about the relationships between Percy and those in her life (friends, coworkers, boyfriends) over the course of the first decade of the new millennium. It is also about Percy finding herself, her place in the changing world. The narrative is a reflective mirror of the times with plenty of familiar sign posts and sounds along the way.

A quick online search revealed the author's website which includes Brickley's brief bio. It isn't hard to see that Deep Cuts has some semi-autobiographical elements to it (she and Percy moved through similar locations and careers at similar times). This appears to be very much a "write what you know" scenario (something we always talk about in the monthly writing group I moderate).