Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the author, publisher and Netgalley for allowing me the privilege of being able to read this book!

I don't know how to put my thoughts into words (which this author does fantastically might I add), but this book was beautiful! It has been a very long time since I have not wanted to put a book down, I could not stop reading this!

I wasn't sure about this book at first the blurb makes it sound like every romance related book out there, and I wasn't fully sure by the first chapter if this would even be for me. But I was wrong, dead wrong. Well there is completely one hundred percent a romance attribute to this book it is so much more than that! This is a journey of life and self-discovery! It pulls you in and makes you feel like you're along for the ride. A ride through my past, to my present. I don't feel like I was in a fantasy world, I felt like I was reliving a part of my youth. As weird as it is to say I feel like I was finally met where I feel I am in life in this book!

Well it seems hinted at throughout the book it's mentioned that the main character should put their writing into a book because it would be so much more. I did do some hunting and I can't find anything to make my feelings a reality other than a few close knit factoids towards the book about the author, but this feels real. Almost like this was her life, because I swear if it wasn't than I've finally found a truly amazing new author who screams author to me. This felt so real, other than some bits of the format I would have felt this was autobiography of a sorts.

Ive seen this compared to other books and I have to say this is so much more! This is completely it's own thing to be forever remembered for! If this is not more than partially touched on the author's life, please can you write more! I would take anything from her, I want that feeling again of reality, and being seen and weirdly of being home.

Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart for honestly giving me what I know is the best book I have read in years and will be the best book for me this year! P.s. also thank you for the deep cuts line in the beginning of this book, it was perfect!

4.75 Stars

Thank you to NetGalley, Holly Brickley, and Penguin Random House Canada (DoubleDay) for the opportunity to read Deep Cuts in exchange for an honest review.

First word that comes to mind is WOW. I cannot wait for pub day so that I can just talk to someone about this book. As someone who really truly connects deeply with music, I adored this book and everything it had to offer. As a debut, this book reads incredibly well. From the pacing to being engaging from start to finish - I really don't have many notes other than this was a fantastic book.

Definitely have Holly Brickley on my radar for any future books.

3.5 stars, rounded up.

This one is for the music lovers. Brickley's impressive debut novel revolves around the relationship between a musician and a music writer/songwriter as they enter adulthood at the turn of the century. Their relationship is messy and fraught with doubts and miscommunication.

Even though the characters can be frustrating, the music references are so deeply felt that you can't help but be swept up in the story, even when you, as the reader, might not know all of the - many - references.

I will definitely be curious as to what Brickley writes next. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC.

This book is so well written it is hard to believe this is a debut for the author!! Big thanks to Netgalley and Crown for the advance read. My opinion - the main character is music. This book doesn’t exist without it. I think that’s why it’s not a full 5 stars - I loved the story, the characters, the settings (very nostalgic early 2000’s for this millennial) - but some of the music stuff was over my head. Definitely worth a read!

My favourite read of 2025 so far. The author has created flawed characters who are vulnerable and frustrating and so deeply relatable that you can’t help but root for and love them. This made me so nostalgic for that time in life as a young adult where friendships are so vital and relationships are complicated but in the most exciting way. I was so sad for it to end.

Deep Cuts was a musical ride through the indie 2000's. I was just 18 in 2000 and this would have been the type of music I was into and grew up listening too.
Life. Happiness. Relationships. Music. Indie music. Love. Heartbreak.
I loved the flow of the book, as the small chapters helped this be a quick read. Not my usual type of book.
4/5

Deep Cuts is a love letter to music, nostalgia, and the tangled mess of relationships that define most of our youths. Holly Brickley’s writing is often stunning, full of rich, atmospheric detail that makes you feel like you’re right there—on the porch, with a cigarette in hand, and the music is turned all the way up. The book shows a deep appreciation for music, which will either feel like an immersive experience or, at times, a bit too much, depending on how much you enjoy music criticism woven into your fictional reading.

At its heart, the novel follows Percy and Joe, whose relationship is as passionate as it is frustrating (it reminded me of the relationship in Normal People). Their will-they-won’t-they tension spans almost a decade, filled with miscommunication, self-sabotage, and bad timing. At times, their dynamic is compelling, but it can also feel exhausting. Percy, in particular, is sharp and opinionated (sometimes to her own detriment) while Joe embodies the classic “tortured artist” trope in a way that might not work for every reader (he felt a little woe is me). Zoe, the best friend, is a highlight, bringing much-needed warmth and perspective.

While the book captures the feeling of growing up in the 2000s beautifully, it can also be indulgent and may not connect with many younger readers (I was born in 98 and had a little trouble...). The references felt like a barrier for entry if you’re not well-versed in indie music history. The story itself meanders a bit, with some moments hitting hard emotionally while others drag. It’s a book that wants you to feel and when it succeeds (because it will), it’s gut-wrenching. But when it doesn’t, it can feel like it’s trying a little too hard.

Overall, Deep Cuts is imperfect but evocative. If you love music, angst, and messy relationships, you’ll probably find something to connect with. If you prefer a tighter, more focused narrative, this might not be for you. It’s an ambitious debut, but one that leaves an impression.

If this was a TV show I would probably enjoy it because flawed characters are fun to watch as long as you have a few characters to root for.

The problem here is that none of the characters are fun to root for and most of the time they annoyed me with how selfish they were. Just a difficult read but if the author ever sells the rights for TV I’ll watch.

Thanks to NetGallery and the published for this arc in exchange for my honest review.

The vibes of Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 live performance of “Silver Springs” as a book (IYKYK).

Listen, I know I’m not going to do this book justice with my review because, like our protagonist Percy, “I have no talent, just opinions about people who do.”

A quote to illustrate the beautiful writing:

“He sent out a long stream of smoke, still nodding, and held the cigarette up to share. I took it for the intimacy, for the moment when my fingers ran up along the backs of his. He turned up the volume until it felt like the whole porch was swallowed in the atmosphere of the song, teetering amid the shuffling brush-drumming and bending guitar notes.”

Music lovers add this to your TBR. I don’t consider myself a music buff. I can only imagine how much deeper my appreciation of this book would have been if I were. It sure made me wish I was though. I love music for how it can make me feel, but I’ve never been great at dissecting the lyrics or songwriting. This book reads like a love letter to music and I always felt just a little bit on the outside, grasping for that connection. Oh how I wish I could listen to “Bay Window” 😭 It seems cruel that this isn’t a real song I can listen to! Despite that fact, reading about the performance of it still brought me to tears.

I cannot belief this is a debut novel! I loved the prose. There were so many bits that spoke to me that I highlighted. I laughed, I fell in and out of love, I cried. My heart broke over and over. I loved the love story, but I also loved the friendships. This was just such a beautiful story 😭❤️

I almost forgot, there is a playlist where you can listen to every song mentioned (recommend):
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/06LlT6TbNiVxRnnSrVi74T?si=nSgGtsHVTP-7j4W78KDUZQ&pi=u-flaSpGwwRMCF


Thank you NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC. Now I’m going to go preorder my own copy because I know I’ll want to read this again.

I loved following the journey through life of the main character, Percy, over many years and cities, as marked by the music of the time. Very introspective, and packed with little gems of wisdom about relationships, trauma, and finding yourself.

If Normal People, Girls, and Daisy Jones and the Six somehow had a baby, it would be this book. I could see this not being everyone’s cup of tea, but I thoroughly enjoyed and look forward to seeing what Holly Brickley writes next!

I would like to thank Penguin Random House Canada, Doubleday Canada and NetGalley for the outstanding opportunity to read and review this book.

When I was about six or seven years old, I became remarkably obsessed with The Beach Boys. There’s a whole story about being at SeaWorld (yuck) and hearing “I Get Around” (yay) and turning to my dad with the widest eyes that I had seemingly ever displayed in my young life and asking, “What…is…this?” From there it was a never-ending quest to amass a collection of every song that these men from California had ever put to tape, a task made not so simple due to a combination of our household being just barely pre-internet and my parents having spent their own time in the 1960s uninterested in pop music while being nightly facets at wild San Francisco jazz clubs with sumptuous, delicious names like Earthquake McGoon’s.

There is a moment of glorious clarity that occurs for Deep Cuts’ narrator, Percy Marks, right around the beginning of her story. Her mother plays her a version of one of the more infamous songs the Beach Boys ever recorded, “Surf’s Up”. Infamous in that it was originally intended to be included with their voice-of-an-actual-angel songwriter/producer/singer Brian Wilson’s magnum opus for the band, *Smile*. The attempted creation of that album nearly killed Brian and rendered him unable to keep touring with the band while also fracturing his mental state permanently. “Surf’s Up” lived on in various shards and pieces over bootlegged outtakes from the recording sessions, eventually showing up in it’s most complete version in 1971 on an album that shared the same name.

Percy’s entire view of the world shifted when she heard “Surf’s Up”. She revelled in the mischievous wordplay of lines like “columnated ruins domino” that Brian Wilson and his lyrical collaborator Van Dyke Parks toyed around with like they were naughty children getting away with something. As a child, I had my own prophetic moment with “Surf’s Up”. My dad had taken out a VHS documentary about the Beach Boys from the local library for me. The way that I watched that tape on repeat every single day before requesting an extension on the loan probably made me look half insane to my parents. But this documentary included two snippets of “Surf’s Up” which at the time, I had never heard. I spent years searching for this song, always coming up short, always finding countless other songs with “surf” in the title that just never scratched that itch. It wasn’t until Napster came around and suddenly, the world of bootlegs offered me a path to this song that changed my life. That changed the life of Percy Marks.

A simple way to explain Deep Cuts would be to call it the story of a college girl meeting a college boy and forming an inescapable bond over music that defines them over the next decade as they each explore new cities, new musical obsessions, new schools, new careers, new relationships and new barriers in understanding each other’s evolution as adults. But Deep Cuts is more than just an ode to music. It’s more than just an ode to that type of relationship you once had that just never seems to take shape or take hold, that one love that eludes you, no matter how much you fight for it or believe in it.

The story of Percy Marks is a love letter to those things in life that you hold so unbelievably close to your heart that they become impossible to explain to anyone without sounding like you’ve lost it. It’s attempting to explain why the John versus Paul argument is ludicrous because they both made each other better and in turn, made the Beatles better. It’s attempting to explain how a lesser-known No Doubt song from their self-released debut album made you believe that fun actually matters. It’s attempting to explain how a record like Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights can define your entire existence in a city and colour the entire space around you simply by existing at the exact right time. And it’s attempting to explain how a song like “Surf’s Up” that originated from a band that up until the point it was recorded had often been seen posing for promo photos in matching shorts, button-downs shirts and deck shoes while all holding a surfboard that only one of them (the drummer) could even passably use was a giant middle finger fuck you to the entire pop music landscape that they had helped birth.

Deep Cuts as a story hit me hard. Because I lived so much of this book. I had these same conversations about music in the same exact bars and venues. I had these same periods of wallowing with friends going on and on about unrequited love as we watched *High Fidelity* and *Say Anything* for the six hundredth time. I played these same shows in front of people that I grew up with and watched their view of me change in real-time. I stood in these same venues and felt my soul leave my body and disappear into the aether when someone like Joanna Newsom would pluck out the opening notes to “Sprout And The Bean”. I walked the same streets of these cities and bellowed out songs drunkenly with friends as we left easier days behind and replaced them with more responsibility, more debt and more of a feeling that there was just never enough time to finish everything that we wanted to do.

As I sit and write this, I recognize that I’ve said very little about Deep Cuts the book itself, which is easily one of the most enjoyable reads that I have had in years. But I feel like it’s author, Holly Brickley, would understand more than anyone why I chose this route when discussing her ridiculously wonderful debut novel , because as she so aptly and so beautifully put it, “we are all just writing about ourselves.”

If you love music, nostalgia, are a millennial, then definitely read Deep Cuts, I loved all these aspects of the book.

The romance to me was secondary to the rivalry they had and the push to be better mixed with their personal growth and the general love letter to music and songwriting made for an original and fresh read.

“Honestly, how many different ways is it even possible for the same two people to break each other’s hearts?”

Devoured this in one sitting. The kind of star-crossed tension and journey of self-discovery that beckons to be inhaled with headphones on, early 2000s playlist bumping. At times perhaps too overly indulgent, reading at times more like a Pitchfork review gone wild than a novel, but the earnest love of music is evident in every page. Percy’s seemingly encyclopedic knowledge spans decades and genres, and what sets apart Brickley’s spin on an otherwise well-tread narrative set-up.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the eARC provided in exchange for my honest review!

A great literary fiction novel centered around love, nostalgia, and music. The character here made me cry more than once. Such a great book!

Spanning most of the 00s, from 2000 to 2008, Deep Cuts is a tribute to music wrapped in a tense and difficult situationship. Divided into three parts, we follow narrator Percy Marks through her undergrad in Berkley, masters in NYC, and talent-seeking pre-influencer scouting job based in San Francisco. The only two constants in her life are best friend Zoe Gutierrez and not-boyfriend Joe Morrow. When she first met them, Zoe and Joe were in a long-term relationship - but Zoe's a lesbian and Joe knows it, and Joe immediately falls for Percy. Joe also wants to form an indie band and make a living out of his songs - songs for which Percy is both his biggest critic and his ghost co-writer. Joe becomes successful with his band Caroline, touring America and Europe throughout the decade. This collaboration is the one thing standing between a relationship, however, as Joe doesn't want to ruin what they have. This leads to a tumultuous decade of the two fighting, working together, leaving each others lives, and more, all while being pulled back together with the worst cosmic timing.

This book gets deep, and it gets deep fast. The entire book revolves around social commentary (before social commentary was mainstream), music criticism, philosophy about life and happiness (through songs!), and more. Add to this the tumultuous relationship I flagged above and you've got a conflict-heavy, slow-burn of a historical romance. I hate that I called the 00s historical romance, but reading the book really shows the reader how different things were just 20 years ago. Stylistically, the book also feels both experimental and intentional, switching between emails, blog posts, texts, and personal narration. Another fun stylistic fact: the cover of the book has the chapters listed as if they were the set-list for a performance. That small print? Yea, those are the chapter titles.

From a critical perspective, the main thing I'll say is that you need a truly in-depth knowledge of music history between the 80s-00s to get all the references and easter eggs in this book. I'm not someone with an incredible knowledge, so a lot of this went over my head. Another potential problem for some readers (though this didn't bother me personally) is that neither Percy nor Joe are really all that likeable. Zoe was the likeable one of the three, constantly supporting the other two even when she was upset with and/or insulting them. But Percy and Joe? They kind of sucked. Percy was stubborn and opinionated, even when being such clearly had a negative impact on the situation, and Joe was... ugh, Joe was just "a man". Ladies, you know what I mean by that.

This book needs to come with a playlist! Percy and Joey drove me nuts but, ultimately, I loved them. Zoe was my favourite character in the book, though. I am not a music nerd, but I am the same age as the characters and loved all the early 2000s nostalgia (even if all the "cool" songs were new to me)

Normal People vibes from this book!! A more real side of first loves, college life, heart break, 20s etc. I liked the blunt writing style and found it actually easier to follow than others written in a similar way!

Thanks to publishers for the ARC in exchange for this review!

This one really surprised me! I had seen so many positive reviews of this and the beginning really didn't grab me so I thought i maybe just wasn't getting it but about halfway through it just all clicked. Then it made me insanely sad and then insanely hopeful. I love being a human and having emotions and what an honour to have pop music to soundtrack all of that!!

This is definitely one of the best books that I have read this year. Filled with music, nostalgia, and angst, Deep Cuts delivered a story that I just did not want to put down.

I want to gush and shout from the rooftop about my love for this novel. This book took me back in time, to college days, to “finding” ourselves, connecting with people and, of course, the music. This book had me right from page one, and I just knew that it was going to be a favorite.

Percy Marks was a music lover extraordinaire. She was not a musician. She loved everything about songs: the lyrics, the music, the bridge, and the hooks. While she often felt awkward and out of place (not known for being a social flower), she always had her music. When she meets Joe Morrow, it’s like he was meant for her. He was her musical soulmate. He was an aspiring musician, while she was happiest dissecting, discussing, and critiquing songs. Joe was also in a relationship with someone else.

Percy and Joe. Whew! Where to begin with them. They were the best of friends. With their shared knowledge and love of music, they seemed like the perfect duo. They put my poor heart through the wringer, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Needless to say, their relationship was filled with collaboration, friendship, attraction, and plenty of highs and lows. I could feel the emotions and the angst right through the pages.

There was so much to love about Deep Cuts. It was a journey of discovery, believing in yourself, striving for what you want in life, making mistakes, and attempting to figure it all out. It was a literary time capsule that made me not only reminisce about years gone by, but it also made me want to pull out all of my old CDs and listen to them again, just to see if I could get a different perspective.

I could go on and on about my love for this novel, but what I really want is for other people to read it and fall in love with it, too. Deep Cuts is the debut novel by Holly Brickley, and what a debut it is! I will certainly be anxiously awaiting her next novel.

*5 Stars