Whet 😏

I recently finished reading Deep End by Ali Hazelwood.

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT

  Rating: 4.25/5 stars

"Scarlett Vandermeer is swimming upstream. A Junior at Stanford and a student-athlete who specializes in platform diving, Scarlett prefers to keep her head down, concentrating on getting into med school and on recovering from the injury that almost ended her career. She has no time for relationships—at least, that’s what she tells herself.

Swim captain, world champion, all-around aquatics golden boy, Lukas Blomqvist thrives on discipline. It’s how he wins gold medals and breaks records: complete focus, with every stroke. On the surface, Lukas and Scarlett have nothing in common. Until a well-guarded secret slips out, and everything changes.

So they start an arrangement. And as the pressure leading to the Olympics heats up, so does their relationship. It was supposed to be just a temporary, mutually satisfying fling. But when staying away from Lukas becomes impossible, Scarlett realizes that her heart might be treading into dangerous water..."

I've said it before and I'll say it again but her books always feel like they're meant for me and me specifically. Her sense of humor lines up so well with mine that I find myself audibly cackling through these books; her FMCs are smart, and driven, and flawed, and make mistakes in ways that I always appreciate even when they're frustrating; her MMCs ALWAYS hit the perfect line of not only loving their partner and being so outrageously down bad for her (Lukas my guy you are OBSESSED and I love it), but actually LIKING her as a PERSON (you'd be surprised how often I read a romance novel like okay I guess you love this person...but do you actually like them?), and her authorial voice has only gotten stronger over these last few years.

I eat up everything she writes and this was no different. I devoured these 450 pages. Jenna and I were supposed to buddy read this, and both of us ended up strongly deviating from the plan. For being her longest book, we were FLYING through this.

I always appreciate the knowledge Hazelwood brings to her books, in STEM or otherwise. As a sports romance, I feel like this delivered much of what I wanted and more, including a great portrayal of the twisties without ever leaning on a magic fix.

This is Ali's sexiest book yet and I LOVED that. I love what she's able to do with character relations in these moments of vulnerability through power exchange sexual dynamics, but on that note the kink is also where this one lost me a bit. In part because we're balancing the MMC at the very least being presented as someone who is very much locked into this side of himself and being very good at it despite the fact that he's only 22 (the most emotionally mature 22 year old man to ever [fictionally] exist, tbh) and has only ever been in a relationship with a partner who wasn't into this and so had very little chance to ever explore it, but by far I think the biggest missed opportunity of this book comes in the fact that there is not a single mention of Aftercare the entire time. Kink exploration is all well and good and Hazelwood well uses that time to establish our characters' connection and communication and vulnerability, but the chance for all of that to come together tenfold in soft moments of aftercare is left on the cutting room floor here! So much of the eroticism of kink in romance novels can be in those quiet moments after a scene, and while I could squint and say that some of their apres-sex scenes could be considered aftercare, I wouldn't actually classify them as such and there's no communication of it being so.

This could be explained away by age and [in]experience, but as mentioned above we're also presented with an MMC shown to be very good at and comfortable with this lifestyle and both of our characters are the type to have done much research on this, so it feels like a huge omission for both of them to completely neglect this.

This is also Hazelwood's longest book yet, and ultimately I don't think it needed to be. There's a good 80 pages in the last third of the book that stagnate both in terms of the relationship and the sports plot where the reading is still fun and had me turning pages, but all while I was asking myself "what are we still doing here? Is anything going to happen? Where is any of this going?"

The climactic conflict isn't nearly satisfying enough to make it feel like it was the peak of 450 pages or to adequately resolve a character issue that had persisted from early on. Some editing down of page count and/or a more robust plot conflict wouldn't have gone amiss here.

All said and done though, another Ali Hazelwood romance that I dearly enjoyed and characters I simply adored. Including side characters. Hazelwood has a particular talent for side characters that I never tire of.

Check out Deep End, and discover what happens when you decide to either sink or swim.

Happy Reading :)