Review: Deep End by Ali Hazelwood

Title: Deep End

Author: Ali Hazelwood

Year published: 2025

Category: Adult fiction (romance)

Pages: 464 pages

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (CA, TX, KT, MO), Sweden, Netherlands

Summary: 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...

Review: I have enjoyed the other Ali Hazelwood books that I've read (lins to my reviews: Not in Love; Love, Theoretically; Love on the Brain; and Love Hypothesis). Hazelwood says at the beginning of this book that her favorite that she's written. I am not sure it's her best, but I enjoyed it.

This novel comes with a warning from the author (and from me). It is a true contemporary romance with all the usual trimmings, but it also deals with BDSM. So, for those of you who don't want to read about that, skip this one. What I liked is that the novel shoes that partners who choose to be Dominant/Submissive do a bunch of work ahead of time: they talk about what they want and what they don't want, they agree on a safe word, and they learn to trust one another explicitly.

I do have a tough time with the female characters in romance novels always being needy, anxious, and saved by a man who knows how to help them get through a crisis. Can't we have romance and still be independent?!

But, this book worked for me. The main characters are swimmers and divers so it is set in a world with which I am very familiar. I also like that her characters are always smart. Like PhD/Med school smart. And she throws around science like we all know what it means, which is fun and not overwhelming.

A good story, characters who are real, and a fun setting. It's all good.

Challenges for which this counts: