REVIEW; Off The Deep End

Title: Off The Deep End
Author: R. Jayne Revere 
Genre: Adult, action, romance
Type: E-book
Publisher: Untamed Originals, LLC

Was it a chance meeting? Or something more…

AN UNUSUAL TRIP

Photographer Alex Thomas longs for adventure in her life, so she accepts her brother’s invitation to go to sea on his research ship. A clandestine recovery operation for the military-complete with a scary-serious security team-is way past Alex’s comfort zone, but that’s nothing compared to the strong, enigmatic attraction she feels for team lead Aaron Donovan.

A REMARKABLE ADVENTURE

While on a critically important assignment, security expert Aaron Donovan is powerfully drawn to Alex, a woman who never should have been there. Then a dark element returns from Aaron’s past, bent on destruction. He and Alex grow closer as they’re forced to work together to save lives, complete the operation, and find out if their newfound love has a chance.

Thank you Booktasters and R. Jayne Revere for the copy of the book!

I received a copy of Off The Deep End some months ago. Due to a number of outside reasons, I had been unable to sit down and finish the novel though I did try and read a few chapters every few days as and when I could.

The novel is both an action adventure and a romance, a mix that did not always land, if I’m honest. We start with Alex, our female character, tagging along on her brother’s work trip with her nephew. We find out she is a photographer and that she loves her family, and that for all of her life, she’s had a sense of someone else that she’s never understood. (This was a strange thing to find in a novel otherwise very grounded in reality.) 

We find out who is on the other end of that almost immediately – obviously, the male love interest. Aaron is on the same trip as security, and he’s a competent individual who is focused on the job, but not so much that he does not have a personality. This is something I definitely liked, that Aaron wasn’t the typical stoic love interest who only showed warmth to the woman he loved. The friendship he has with other characters, the respect he shows to the people on the ship – they set a tone for the characters that I really enjoyed.

But while the main characters are interesting enough, and their connection is developed decently throughout the novel from a friendship on the boat – with a healthy dose of attraction on both fronts – and the chemistry palpable, the novel falters in other places. There is a lack of significant female characters in the story that Alex comes across as Not Like Other Girls, or the One Exception To Women Everywhere even though when she does think on her (one) named female friend, there is no degrading thought, nothing about not fitting in with traditional femininity. She instead does show interest in all that – it just has no place in the story, and because of the love story aspect of the novel, it feels a little off.

The writing also suffers from a mix of purple prose that works only some of the time. At others, it is jarring and too grandiose for the characters. And other times, choppy sentences that are jarring when used in the softer scenes. Used sparingly, this mix does work, but the author seems to have not gotten the balance just right.

Where the story really shines is in the action scenes. The writing is paced just right, with things happening one after another. The characters are shown to be competent, and in the antagonist’s case, dangerous. Everything we are told about them in the beginning comes across in the climax in a way that made me fly through the chapters, wondering just how they were going to get out. The payoff is worth every bit of build up we get.

And the end feels earned for it. The couple’s trust and faith in each other feels rewarded, their partnership feels equal – the author created characters that definitely come across as not just tolerating each other but liking each other. While there are a couple of things that felt open ended – just why do Alex and Aaron have this weird almost supernatural empathic connection? Who is the they Essex was referring to? – it also feels like a complete story in and of itself, and despite my little gripes about writing and a lack of female presence on the page, it was an entertaining story that lives up to the action genre.

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