On the face of it, Holly Brickley’s Deep Cuts seems like it would be a very similar story to Marissa Stapley’s The Lightning Bottles as they are both novels about a pair of music lovers where the man finds greater success than his female counterpart, but these novels are actually quite different from each other. And while I think I they are both good novels, Deep Cuts is the one that I would most likely read again.

Deep Cuts is set in the early 2000s and is about a college student named Percy Marks who has a deep appreciation for music. She is not a musician or a singer, but she is opinionated and loves to pontificate on music. One night at a bar, she meets fellow college student Joe Morrow, who gladly listens to her overanalyze the song playing on the jukebox, “Sara Smile”by Hall & Oates. It turns out Joe is a songwriter, and he asks Percy if she is willing to give him some feedback on his own songs. She obliges and helps Joe with tweaking his lyrics, and she ends up falling in love with him. Luckily for her, Joe’s girlfriend Zoe – who eventually becomes Percy’s closest friend – is a lesbian and breaks up with Joe and gives Percy permission to date him. But Joe, despite his attraction to Percy, does not want to date her because he does not want to risk losing her as a songwriting partner.

This isn’t good enough for Percy, who decides to try to move on with her life without Joe, while Joe starts touring and begins to find success as an indie-rock artist with the songs that Percy helped him write, while getting no credit for it. He makes his way back into her life after a few years just to ask her to help him write music for his next album, which pisses Percy off so much that she gets petty revenge on him, but it also helps her to figure out how she can turn her passion for music into an actual job that could pay a livable wage.

Deep Cuts does not have an enticing mystery story wrapped up in a message about misogyny in the music industry like The Lightning Bottles. Instead, it is like a deeply personal love song dedicated to one person’s relationship with music. Percy uses music to help her figure stuff out about herself and about her relationship with Joe, and the reason why I like Deep Cuts more than The Lightning Bottles is because Percy is a more relatable character to me than Jane Pyre. Percy reminds me a lot of myself at her age, except I think she has more confidence than I did when I was in my 20s. But as with The Lightning Bottles, I spent my time reading Deep Cuts hoping that Percy did not end up with Joe because I feel like music is more important to Joe than Percy will ever be.

The chapter titles in Deep Cuts are named after actual songs (except for a couple of fictional songs by Joe and Percy) that are the soundtrack to certain moments in Percy’s life. I am sure we all have songs like that, songs that when they play, bring us back to important moments in our lives, good or bad. I know many of the songs mentioned in the novel, but not all of them, so I felt a bit lost while reading Deep Cuts. I do like listening to music, but not as much as I did when I was a teenager. Reading books like Deep Cuts reminds me of how important music can be and makes me wish I had more of an appreciation for it.