Deep End by Ali Hazelwood

RomanceSportsContemporaryFeminist

Mar 11

Written By taylor shepeard

Title: Deep End

Author: Ali Hazelwood

Publication Date: February 4, 2025

Audience: Adult

Genre: Romance

Sub-Genre: Contemporary / Sports

POV: Single

Series: Standalone | Same Universe

Format: Audiobook

—Narrator(s): Thérèse Plummer ; Ben Holtzmuller

3.75 ⭐ | 3🌶️

Pros:
✨Prose / Writing Style
✨Diving as the Sports Focus
✨Communication During Scenes

Cons:
✨Underdeveloped / Unexplored Backstory
✨Pen
✨Underdeveloped Romance
✨Insta-Love
✨Miscommunication / Contrived Conflict
✨Audio Narration

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.
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…

*Blurb taken from The StoryGraph

Review

This review may contain spoilers.

Premier collegiate diver Scarlett Vandermeer has returned to her sport after a severe injury her Freshman year, and despite having a bill of health physically, she still can’t bring herself to perform the dives she used to. Stressed, caught up in her head, and with no time for an intense relationship, she falls into a kink-driven situation-ship with Swiss Olympian swimmer and fellow med-student, Lukas Blomqvist.

I’m an Ali Hazelwood stan. I never thought I would genuinely dislike any novel of hers. But there were just so many things that didn’t work here.

Unlike in Hazelwood’s other novels, I never connected to or engaged with the main character. Sarlett has a severe people-pleasing, fatalistic mindset that led to a lack of communicating. She would withhold the most basic of wants, and it drove me up the wall—it really felt like she was going out of her way to punish herself. (If you want to text Lukas, TEXT HIM. It’s not that big.) I think I would have been less aggravated with this character flaw if we'd gotten more backstory regarding her relationship with her father, because then it would have been a personal conflict with a healing journey. We didn’t, so it was nothing more than an exasperating personality trait. Her past felt more like a quickie explainer for her mental obstacles than any actual trauma she worked through via on-page character development. I’ve seen better from Hazelwood in this regard, like in Love, Theoretically, and felt this novel fell short when compared to the author’s own past works.

This character disconnect only added to my frustration with Scarlett’s behavior around her teammate, Pen. Their entire conflict was weird. We spent an equal amount of time focused on Scarlett and Pen’s twisted relationship as we did with Scarlett and Lukas’s. It made for a plot disaster. Scarlett and Pen were both bad friends—let’s be clear. If Scarlett felt she was going to hurt Pen due to her blooming relationship with Lukas, she should have been direct. Instead, she dances around the topic, makes excuses about why she shouldn’t tell Pen about her feelings, and dove headfirst into the despised miscommunication trope. And Pen, to be blunt, was a selfish, manipulative asshat who consistently played the victim. After their huge fallout, the repair of the relationship was abrupt and convenient. I really loathed this entire plot line.

And because we spend so much of the text focused on Pen, we lose time with Scarlett and Lukas. Of all the Hazelwood’s I’ve read, Lukas is by far the flattest MMC she’s written, and it’s because he was merely a catalyst to what became the actual main conflict—Scarlett and Pen’s toxic friendship. We get facts about him, but little emotional depth, which I think is foundational to an authentic relationship. He is, somehow, a master of kink and communication despite being as new to it as Scarlett. A majority of their relationship is sex, in large part because Scarlett can’t communicate. Period.

I did love the setting and the way we got immersed in the realm of diving. Going into this novel, I knew next to nothing about the sport and found it fascinating. It was also fun seeing Olive and Adam again, as they’re fan favorites for sure!

But, I wanted more on Scarlett’s mental health and her healing journey. I needed more emotional intimacy between her and Lukas. And I groaned every time Pen made an appearance, which, if I went back and counted, probably outnumbered Lukas’s appearances.

I also struggled with the audiobook narration. It's hard to tell what Scarlett says aloud and what's internal monologue. This made following conversations difficult at times, because I would think Scarlett said something aloud when she hadn’t, or vice versa. Then, based on how the other character responded, I’d have to pause and backtrack to figure out what happened. There is also a male narrator who comes in to speak for male characters, which tossed me right out of the story at first. After I got used to the dual narration, I actually really enjoyed this, and Ben Holtzmuller did a great job with his part of the audio. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to carry the narration. If you do get the chance to grab a physical copy, I would recommend that.

I’ll keep reading Hazelwood’s books for sure—one miss won’t stop me! But man, this was disappointing.