I don't understand who this book is for. I think if you're looking for some erotic content you should just read porn. It would be better than this and more to your personal tastes. Maybe this book is your taste but enduring the plot in between the porn is not worth it. I felt so little while reading this book, my most visceral reaction was to the non-prepped anal sex which is suchhhhh a man's porn fantasy my god.

I think Ali Hazelwood made the same mistake with Deep End that she did with Not in Love. To put a disclaimer in the front that this book contains bdsm etc. It massively skews the expectation of what the content in this book is going to be like. It's not particularly justified, 90% of the sex between Lukas and Scarlett could easily happen without the premise of "kink" in any book and I would've thought nothing of it. For how often Scarlett refers to kink, perversion, and being sexual deviants you'd really expect them to be FREAKS. If I'd actually got to read the lists they exchanged with each other I might have understood the disclaimer. Scarlett is very run of the mill - likes a guy to say nice things while not being the one to run the show. It becomes more "dom" heavy but that's mostly Lukas's words. Ali is operating like she's still posting on AO3 but the tag system there and a disclaimer on the front are two massively different ways of communicating content.

This book would've benefited from aging up the characters. There's a lot of work put in to subtly age up Lukas without making him older. Multiple mentions of his maturity, his cleanliness, and all around giving him the "not like other boys" treatment. Just make him older! And her! I think at 21/22 you know what you're into but at the same time, I think you don't necessarily have as much experience to know what you like in reality vs fantasy. Scarlett is very "spent a lot of time on tumblr/forums" with no experience but TEXTBOOK perfect answers on sub/dom stuff. Even older they could have still been athletes, and Scarlett's "what will I do if I can't dive?" would make more sense if she wasn't planning on quitting her senior year for med school!! But instead was an older athlete who would have to find a new job/dream etc.

First off, the narrator for the Monique sections read every line as though she were showing you her manuscript but was embarrassed to be doing it and prefacing it with "it's not very good, I know it needs work", real annoyingly self effacing. It was an interesting choice for all of two seconds and after that it consistently bothered me. I shouldn't mark that as a quality against the book itself but it was so distracting I don't think I can ignore it.

Anyway the book itself is a real mixed bag. Monique is such a wasted character. She's not interesting or enjoyable, which is a shame. While I like Evelyn Hugo's story I think the framing narrative of the interview is a necessary addition to make it stand out as opposed to just a straight up and down novel, but the benefit of having an interview is the dialogue between subject and interviewer, the conflict between what the subject is willing to talk about and what the interviewer wants to get out of them. And Monique was just incapable of being that character, she barely pushed on anything that Evelyn was avoiding, and would do that chagrined embarrassed voice at the first hint of conflict.

Evelyn's life was in general pretty interesting, you can't not get interesting when you're dealing with studio era Hollywood. I appreciate the various kinds of love shown in this story, I have a massive soft spot for platonic marriages and co-parenting situations, so I really enjoyed that aspect. A lot of the dialogue was very therapy speak though, there is no way this many messed up Hollywood people are being this forthright about their feelings.

I feel like this whole book was written just to facilitate the last line and I think that's justified it's a good line.