Author: Ali Hazelwood
# of Pages: 464 (ebook)
Genre: Adult, Romance, Contemporary
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Synopsis: 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.
Review: I've read two Ali Hazelwood before this, but this is my intro to her contemporary romance writing (which I heard was better than her paranormal romance).
It wasn't.
One of the characters in this book kept saying that Scarlett's kinks are "so Fifty Shades!" (since she's into the dom/sub aspect of BDSM). This essentially set the stage for the rest of the book; it felt like a watered down Fifty Shades of Grey. There was a lot of smut, but it actually wasn't that kinky and a bit boring, honestly. I thought that they would explore more of the kinks they supposedly shared, but it was mostly just him telling her what to do and her crying because she liked it so much.
There's no depth in the relationship between the two main characters. It's fine to have two characters bond over shared kinks, but it's hard to call this true romance when they don't seem to do much together except want to have sex, and all their emotions seems to be based off the greatness of their sex lives. The dom/sub kink seemed to be their whole personality, the defining feature who makes them who they are. I would have preferred more nuance to their characters.
And of course I was constantly frustrated with the plot because most of the problems fall under the poor communication trope! These characters will just choose to not talk to each other for long stretches of time, another character wants to withhold information about a breakup and keep up the facade of being a couple (oh what could go wrong?)...
Usually with this trashy, smutty romance books, it'll be at least a fast read. However, this was not the case for Deep End; had to really push through the beginning half especially when it felt like very little of anything was happening.
I would not recommend this book.
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