I think I’ve mentioned before in some of my reviews that contemporary romance isn’t really a genre I read very much of (although I have read a few in the past couple of years that I’ve really enjoyed). I’ve been wanting to branch out into it more, and I liked Ali Hazelwood’s vampire-werewolf paranormal romance Bride when I read it last year, so I recently picked up her latest release, Deep End.
The main character in Deep End is Scarlett Vandermeer (“Vandy” to her friends), a student at Stanford who is also an athlete on the diving team. She’s recently re-joined the team after taking some time off to recover from an injury. When one of her teammates, Penelope (“Pen”), confides in her about the sexual compatibility issues she and soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, Lukas, are experiencing (he’s into BDSM, she very much isn’t), Scarlett shares with Pen her own similar experiences with her ex (who also very much wasn’t into BDSM, while Scarlett is). This leads to Scarlett and Lukas finding out that they are into the same sort of things, and (predictably) things heat up from there.
This was actually a lot of fun. Hazelwood’s writing really works for me, and the story was well balanced between Scarlett overcoming some mental blocks preventing her from fully competing in diving and her developing relationship with Lukas.
It wasn’t perfect—there were some pieces that dragged on a bit (I didn’t need to know quite so much about the logistics of a diving competition, and Penelope’s behaviour was grating at times), but overall, I had fun reading this and will likely pick up some of Hazelwood’s other books in the future.
