{"id":78457,"date":"2025-04-03T09:22:37","date_gmt":"2025-04-03T13:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/?p=78457"},"modified":"2025-04-03T09:22:37","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T13:22:37","slug":"audio-review-deep-end-by-ali-hazelwood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/?p=78457","title":{"rendered":"Audio Review: Deep End by Ali Hazelwood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Buy:\u00a0 Amazon<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n
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Review<\/strong><\/h4>\n

3.5 stars<\/b><\/p>\n

A steamy college sports romcom, this is a fun, clever and sexy romance, and I really enjoyed this one.<\/p>\n

Scarlett is a student athlete at Stanford. She is studying pre-med and balancing her near-perfect academic achievements with platform diving. She is quiet and a bit reserved, and is coming back from a near career-ending diving injury which has left with a severe case of the yips, but she\u2019s got her head down and is determined to achieve in all things as she has always done.<\/p>\n

Lukas is a Swedish swimming phenom. A fellow pre-med student at Stanford, he is captain of the swim team, Olympic gold medallist, world record holder and everybody\u2019s favourite guy. And Scarlett has just discovered that Lukas is a little bit kinky, and he\u2019s looking for somebody to explore his secret nature with. Coincidentally, Scarlett has secret kinks of her own, and when the two of them are thrown together and their secrets are revealed, they agree to a no-strings BDSM(ish) relationship to give them both a safe place to explore their sexuality together.<\/p>\n

Holy hotness, I was not expecting this book! Scarlett and Lukas are open about everything, and as they explore their wild sides, we are right there with them. It\u2019s not too kinky, the BDSM aspect is mostly about power and control (which is openly communicated, and consent is discussed regularly) but the chemistry sizzles, and the sexy scenes are seriously steamy. And as they\u2019re opening up to each other about all things, they become friends, they provide support and become each other\u2019s \u2018person\u2019, and Scarlett finds herself falling in ways she never expected.<\/p>\n

This is a fun story. It\u2019s written entirely from Scarlett\u2019s POV, and there\u2019s a lot going on for her, but the romance is not as prominent as I like in my romcoms (because I\u2019m a romantic sap). The sex is intense, their feelings for each other are definitely there, but it takes a while for the relationship to develop, and the romance is definitely a slow burn. Lukas and Scarlett both have a lot of competing priorities and there\u2019s multiple storylines going on, and they don\u2019t even really spend that much time together – it\u2019s weeks or months between meet ups, and they seem to give each other a lot of space. I got the feeling that Lukas was more invested than Scarlett was, but being the sappy romance junkie that I am, I would have liked to see a bit more of an effort on both of their parts to actually be together.<\/p>\n

I really liked Scarlett, and I enjoyed her character development. She\u2019s a socially awkward STEM girl, and between her coursework, her diving, her therapy sessions, new friendships, and all that she is exploring with Lukas, she learns a lot about herself and comes out of her shell, and I loved seeing her work through her issues, start to really embrace her life and find her HEA.<\/p>\n

And I really enjoyed Lukas. He is so refreshingly open! He doesn\u2019t play games, he shares things about his life and himself, and they talk about all things sex (as you would in their situation), but he\u2019s more reserved when it comes to his feelings. It\u2019s one of those situations where you suspect there is more happening than what you are aware of, but we only get Scarlett\u2019s perspective on things. I enjoyed the hints that are dropped along the way, and guessing where Lukas\u2019 head (and heart) was at, and I loved how no-nonsense he was about everything.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a bit of a forbidden twist to their relationship which adds to the intensity and, of course, the high-intensity world of college sports and high-strung athletes also brings its own drama. I liked the balance of how all of the different parts of this book come together to create a fully fleshed-out story that had me completely immersed in Scarlett\u2019s world.<\/p>\n

There is a bit of OW drama that I wasn\u2019t a huge fan of.

<\/span>Spoiler<\/div>
It didn\u2019t have a huge impact on the story, but was enough to niggle at me\u2026 Lukas\u2019 long-time girlfriend, Pen, is a teammate of Scarlett\u2019s. They have just broken up and it\u2019s completely amicable (it seems liked it was more of a \u2018friends with benefits\u2019 situation than an actual relationship), but it\u2019s Pen that brings Lukas and Scarlett together. She remains best friends with Lukas, leaning on him for support and whenever she needs to talk, and he drops everything to help her whenever she needs him. And the reason why there\u2019s a forbidden element to Scarlett and Lukas\u2019 \u2018relationship\u2019 is because Pen doesn\u2019t want to deal with the fallout of a public breakup, so all of their friends and teammates think they are still dating. Why? Who knows? But the whole time, Scarlett and Pen are actually growing closer and becoming the best of friends, and Scarlett feels weird about sharing her feelings for Lukas with her. It\u2019s all a bit strange, and I really could have done without this part of the story, but it\u2019s where the drama comes from, and partially explains the slow burn.<\/div><\/div>\n

This is an enjoyable read. I would have liked more from the romance, but I couldn\u2019t put this book down, and was invested from start to finish.<\/p>\n

3.5 stars.<\/p>\n

I listened to this as an audiobook narrated by Therese Plummer and Ben Holtzmuller. The book is written entirely from Scarlett\u2019s perspective, but it\u2019s a duet-style narration, and it\u2019s so good! Therese tells Scarlett\u2019s story with humour and heart, and Ben does so many accents so, so well, and his Lukas voice is wildly hot. I recommend listening to this one.<\/p>\n

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Buy:\u00a0 Amazon Review 3.5 stars A steamy college sports romcom, this is a fun, clever and sexy romance, and I really enjoyed this one. Scarlett is a student athlete at Stanford. She is studying pre-med […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","yasr_overall_rating":3.5,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[454,972,13,911,9,58,29],"tags":[1414,48,76],"class_list":["post-78457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-audio-recommendation","category-forbidden","category-new-adult","category-no-strings","category-romance","category-sports-star","category-steamy","tag-ali-hazelwood","tag-review","tag-standalone"],"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":false,"span_bottom":false},"number_of_votes":0,"sum_votes":0},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Deep-End.jpg?fit=200%2C300&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gaNL-kpr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/76428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapistbookblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}