The story of a complex, complicated, and oft-fraught relationship

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?

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.

Holly Brickley’s Deep Cuts got a lot of pre-publication buzz, with early readers name-dropping novels like Daisy Jones and the Six as a comparator (mainly because this is also connected to music, and with a complicated central relationship). As it turns out, the buzz was justified: this is a very good novel, and I quickly found myself invested in Percy and Joe’s fates.

I had high hopes for Deep Cuts before I read it, and it did not disappoint. I’ve long been drawn to stories about music — in novels and also biographies of favourite artists, and this novel looked like it would suit my tastes perfectly. And, I’m happy to say, it exceeded my expectations. Perhaps its greatest strength lies in the characters. Brickley does a great job developing the main characters in realistic and natural ways. The core relationship is very well-written, not always romantic, but believable (if not desirable) in its messiness and complications. One could see in Percy and Joe’s relationship echoes of some of the best stories about art born from fraught relationships — be they fictional (à la Daisy Jones & the Six and The Lightning Bottles) or non-fiction (see, for example, Fleetwood Mac).

The novel, in many ways a bildungsroman, takes us through Percy’s musical and personal journey, as she comes to grips with the power of her musical and emotional connection to Joe, but also while navigating a world that too-often relegates female creative partners to the footnotes of history. Percy must also navigate growing up and finding her place in the world and with others — her friendships and relationships are well-written, and many of her social and personal struggles will no doubt resonate with plenty of readers. The author’s love for really music comes through in her characters (I related quite strongly with Percy’s music obsession), and it’s used as a great narrative device throughout the story.

With engaging, three-dimensional and realistic characters, Deep Cuts is a story about the messiness of life, and the power of music to bring people together. Definitely recommended. Very much looking forward to Brickley’s next book, whatever it happens to be.

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Holly Brickley’s Deep Cuts is out now, published by Crown in North America and Borough Press in the UK.

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Review copy received via NetGalley