I love Ali Hazelwood, I really do. But her recent tendency towards the meek and emotionally immature female main character has me throwing my hands up in exasperation.
This has been a slow, steady decline. Hazelwood has always been a fan of the miscommunication trope (or no communications at all, as the case may be), and it's the one overarching conflict in all of her books. But to make this trope into a scenario in which hundreds of pages could be written to keep two seemingly compatible people apart, one or the other must suffer from an inability to say what's on their mind. And so here we go again in Deep End.
This book had so much potential. Instead of the usual STEM participants that we've come to expect, we have collegiate athletes who also happen to take their education seriously. Now, as a STEM girl myself, I'm all for scholastic excellence, so to have both that and athletic achievement was almost too much for my nerdy heart to take. But the keyword here is "almost" because it started to go off the rails pretty much immediately.
Scarlett is a diver who harbors a secret inclination for BDSM-style sex. She also suffers from mental block and leftover trauma (the reasons behind the aforementioned inability to communicate). In swoops Lukas, a hot swimmer who just happens to harbor her same sexual inclinations. Only problem? He's the ex of her best friend.
On paper, the premise sounds fine. But even a cursory glance would have you come to the realization that the main conflict for the couple (her friend/his ex) is a thin one at best. How long could this self-inflicted martyrdom on behalf of her friend—who encouraged them to get together in the first place—go on for Scarlett? Well, the book clocks in at almost 450 pages, and you really start to feel it as it goes on.
By the time we get to the final culminating conflict, the wheels have really come off. Scarlett, in all of her meekness, could only watch in horror and victimhood as her friend, whom she has lied to and gaslit the whole way, finally called her up on it. But since Scarlett is the main character and could do no wrong, her friend was the one who eventually had to shoulder the blame and come crawling back to apologize.
You know, in psychology, there is this concept of nice versus kind. Nice is the superficial construct of always saying polite pleasantries and what the other person wants to hear, all in service of getting them to like you. But kindness is a deeper, more empathetic understanding of how to help the other person in the long run, even if it means they might not like you as much in the short term. Scarlett is all former, but the book is written such that it makes her seem like the latter, and I found the whole thing insufferable.
I don't blame the characters, obviously, since it's the authors who make them that way. And I don't even really blame the authors. I get that romance as a genre has always been looked down upon and to be taken seriously, writers feel that they must lean ever more into the conflicts and the trauma and the flawed characters in order to get there. But at some point, you've plumbed the depth of the scenario, and there is just no way to dig any deeper without going so over the top that you're just taking away from the story and the characters.
Also, a big deal is made about the BDSM exploration in this story, with the author even including a note to warn readers at the beginning. But it was so tame that I'm not sure I would've even noticed if the book had not made a huge deal of it. As it stands, the spicy scenes were steamy enough, but they also contain the sort of odd, inadvertently funny quirks that pepper Hazelwood's sex scenes (swallowing a whole boob in another book, constantly tear licking in this one).
And don't even get me started on how all the guys in this story seemed to lust after Scarlett, even though she's devoid of personality and can barely utter a complete sentence around them without a lot of hemming and hawing. Does it remind you of a certain book that rhymes with Twimight? Hmm, maybe that's just me.
All this complaining and yet I keep coming back to Ali Hazelwood. Her writing just grabs me, and no one does banter quite like her. So when we weren't stuck inside Scarlett's head and her back-and-forth about how she has no friends and no one could like her and how scary every male is and how she can't possibly let her best friend know about her feelings, I actually had fun. But it was just so few and far in between, and the rest so exhausting, that it sucked all the energy out the book.
Am I going to keep reading Ali Hazelwood? I don't know. The issue seems to lie in her full-length novels where she has the page count to really go to town on her female main characters, while her novellas remain as fun as they've always been. So there, I guess I've just answered my own question.
Readaroo Rating: 2 stars
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