Spoilers below!
I really wanted to like this one. I love music references, passionate characters, and the promise of an upcoming movie, and yet! this one, unfortunately, did not land for me.
My biggest gripe was with the characters. I hate to hate a character for being unlikeable or unrealistic, but it’s hard to power through when all the characters – especially the main will-they-won’t-they-couple – are both unlikeable and unrealistic at the same time.
Who should I be rooting for? The pretentious female lead whose main character trait is… liking music? And writing too, maybe? As long as it’s about music? Or the pretentious male lead whose main character trait is… making music? Oh, and he’s a douchebag too? With a secret heart of gold? In the way that all men in bands stereotypically are? Got it!
I was originally sold on this as “Daisy Jones & The Six meets Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” and Deep Cuts wishes it could meet the emotional depth of either of those two books. This book shares a love of music with the former and the extended storyline – though frankly, not really – of the latter, and that’s about it, in my opinion. It didn’t have Daisy Jones’s creative framing and ensemble cast, or Tomorrow’s character development and passion for creation. Hell, Deep Cuts barely has a satisfying story arc at all.
On the flip side, if the movie is able to license all of the music referenced in the book and incorporate it in some Slumdog Millionaire-esque way, then I would love to see it! I listened to this as an audiobook, so it was difficult to switch back and forth between song and story, and I definitely think that having the background soundtrack would have made me enjoy reading this one a lot more. (I know there’s a playlist on Spotify – it’s not the same!)
Trisha Serquina 