A college diver and Olympic swimmer enter into a BDSM relationship in Ali Hazelwood’s DEEP END–but it’s the romance I wanted to make more of a splash. My DEEP END review and thoughts are below!
Reading is about joy! I read romance novels because I find them to be a welcome, joyful escape from the everyday. I love playing with the tropes of romance and being surprised! I want to be rooting for our main characters to figure their stuff out and find each other. And that’s why, if I”m just not feeling it, I think deciding to walk away from a book is totally and completely a legitimate decision. I don’t even feel like not finishing a book means it’s a “bad” book–it just means I wasn’t finding that joy. If I feel like I’ve made a significant attempt and I’m just not vibing it, I’m ok to walk away!
Unfortunately DEEP END by Ali Hazelwood became my first DNF of the year. I know Ali has tons and tons of fans, and I think that’s amazing! Her writing, I think particularly about mental health, women in STEM, and sex positivity obviously connects with an audience. I have read a couple of her books, and always liked the writing and love the STEM backdrop. DEEP END is her first college sports story, so it’s a bit of a departure (although there are still STEM elements, more on that later), but I unfortunately just didn’t connect to the romance in this one.
DEEP END is the story of NCAA level Stanford diver, Scarlet ‘Vandy’ Vandermeer. She used to have all the confidence in the world both as a diver and as a pre-med major. But after an accident on a dive that left her shoulder hurt and gave her a concussion, she has struggled to get her confidence back. And although she’s seeing a therapist, she still can’t attempt an inward dive–the type of dive she originally missed. The captain of the diving team, Pen, has secretly split up with Swedish superstar Olympic swimmer Lukas Blomqvist because he wants a kinkier sexual relationship than she wants. As it turns out, Vandy is also kinky and offers her advice to Pen. When Pen discovers that Vandy is into the same stuff as Lukas, she suggests they try each other out. Lukas thinks it’s a good idea, and he and Vandy strike up an arrangement.
I find the world of diving and college athletics to be really interesting, and I felt like I learned a lot about diving that I didn’t know. I like swimming and diving as much as anyone else every four years at the Olympics. It also seemed very realistic to me that the book was able to explore mental health issues for student athletes. Shockingly, I was not a student athlete (ok, shocking to absolutely no one who knows me), but I do understand and relate to the fact that they are incredibly driven, type A performers. They can be scheduled within an inch of their lives but with very little time for academics and to explore personal relationships, which can cause issues of never feeling perfect enough. The issues Vandy deals with when it comes to her confidence level in school and in the pool are empathetic and honest. I also thought it was clear how insular a world diving is, which made just having any kind of normalcy to her life a challenge.
The problem for me was that while I found Vandy realistic, I didn’t particularly enjoy spending time with her as she constantly beat herself up. Lukas, with his dominant personality and supreme confidence almost felt like the wrong tonic to me. He reads very superficial. I didn’t get much from him other than he wants to be a dom and he’s super into swimming. Potentially this is how this type of guy is, but I didn’t find much appeal in him. It’s set up that both Lukas and Vandy are working on a STEM project together. But I didn’t feel like either of them believably as scientists and this element felt a bit jammed in there just to connect it to some of Hazelwood’s other work. So ultimately I wasn’t rooting for their relationship, and I didn’t necessarily see him as someone who could be really helpful to Vandy.
DEEP END is also very centered on their sex life as it’s a main driver both of the plot and of Vandy and Lukas’s actions throughout the story. The problem here is that the sex scenes are built up so much and then they don’t deliver anything that feels THAT out of the ordinary (as a reader of a TON of these types of scenes!!!). I think when 50 SHADES OF GREY, which this book is compared to, came along, all of those intimate scenes felt both surprising and scandalous. A decade later, it feels a bit been there, done that. All of that is fine, but then it probably shouldn’t be set up as this main driver of their relationship if it’s meant to feel spicy in a way that’s pushing the limits.
The last reason I decided to move on from DEEP END is that I had a hard time connecting to Vandy and Pen’s friendship. I felt like the original set up of Pen suggesting Vandy and Lukas have a sexual relationship felt so awkward. She was drunk when she suggested it. But then when they actually started having this relationship, Pen said she was fine with it. I didn’t buy personally that Vandy would have jeopardized her relationship with Pen in this way, or that Pen would have suggested this as a good idea. I just didn’t get on the ride of the main female relationship/friendship here.
I believe in both giving a book a solid chance and putting it down if it’s just not going to work. While I liked the introduction of DEEP END, I found myself sort of skimming to get to see what would be so insane in the bedroom scenes. That’s never a good sign–it just means I’m not interested in the romance which is the most important element for me. Obviously this book is worth a try for readers who are fans of Hazelwood. There’s also a subset of romance novels that focus more on mental health, so I think it’s possible if that is of interest to you this would be worth a try. But for me, it was time to try something else.
My Deep End Review Rating
This was a DNF for me, so I will hold back on giving it a number rating.
My Romance Recipe Pairing
I think DEEP END would go great with my Roasted Sausage, Pepper, and Fennel Raviolini! It’s loaded with veggies (for the athlete) and cheese and pasta for the bad girl within (lol).
Synopsis for Deep End
Synopsis (from Amazon):
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...
Buy DEEP END on Amazon
