The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas - Book Review (No spoilers)

~ The blurb I didn't bother putting in because it does not match the actual book ~

I have been cheated.

This book is a scam. Would I call it bad? No. House of Night was bad. The Twilight movies were bad. But this, this was so mind-numbing horrible that I have no words to describe its disgustingness. It promises us "an enemies-to-lovers, fake-dating romantic comedy. Perfect for those looking for a steamy slow-burn romance". Instead, it is a series of poorly executed, cringy clichés, with little to no plot or character development, and an unoriginal, expected climax. It was horrible. Wait, I already called it that. Then it was dreadful, horrifying, awful, terrible, appalling, hideous, ghastly, harrowing, gruesome, heinous, vile and loathsome.

It was so bad that it made my vocabulary run out, and I had to copy-paste words from Google.

No wonder I hated it, and here's more on why.



Characters - Okay, I will talk about them first, because the two main characters were basically the only thing this book had going on. That didn't work so much in its favour, since I hated both of them. Well technically, I hated their life choices, personalities and behaviour. But that's basically them.

I could not stand Lina at all. She had no personality except being a perky, obsessed-with-sweets Spanish person. In the author's effort to make her generic, she has gone so far as to say that the whole of Spain was filled with an "army" of Linas. One would assume this meant Miss Catalina Martin was a relatable, enjoyable book character who made sense to the reader. But well, she wasn't. Instead, we got a brainless manic whose only personality trait was grieving about her non-existent love-life and oOgLiNg her co-worker's broad chest and hard abs. Her family and all only seemed decent when they made fun of Lina, but that was not very often.

Aaron Blackford was...honestly I have no idea. All I gathered from Lina's shallow descriptions of him was that he was a blue-eyed mountain who kneaded people's body parts with a passion. And all the "drawing circles" with his thumb was pretty revolting. I will not get into all his animal attitude and creepy behaviour because it is not worth talking about. This guy just wasn't for me. I mean, he could be a gentleman and all, but he was super fixated on Lina and I can't see how he could have time to focus on anything but her. What's up with dwarfing all the furniture, dude? Also, 6'4" is tall, but not as tall as Aaron was made to sound; as if none of them had ever seen anyone that huge in their life. As if this happened to him every night-



Most reviews I read liked Lina's views about women in the workplace, and of course, I agree with them too, but I did not like how the author has portrayed Lina handling them. I cannot consider her a headstrong woman when all she does is run away from fights or let her large boyfriend handle them for her. I get that it was affecting her and she tried the best she could, but I could not count that as her victory because of the way she reacted.

Pacing - Maybe romances just aren't for me, but the beginning of this book was super slow. I am not used to reading 500-page contemporaries, and after reading this one I can see why they aren't written so long. When the only plot is two people falling in love, that can get boring fast. The first chapter was just Aaron offering to be Lina's date, and her saying no. The words "I don't need you" have been read by me more times in those ten minutes than they have in my entire life. After a few more chapters, I would have said this book was getting better, but only because of the drastically low standards set by the horrible first couple of chapters. I was still waiting for something consequential to happen. The whole thing to do with the man-auction could have been cut out entirely. I was bored when I was not even one-fourth of the way through.

Writing - Pardon my ignorance, but I thought the enemies-to-lovers trope indicates that the characters go from enemies to lovers. I was not aware that they had to go from secretly loving each other to openly loving each other. And where was the "comedy"? The "slow burn romance"? All I saw was two shallow people's shallow wuv for each other.

The book was also way too repetitive for mine- or anyone's- liking. Lina going on about Aaron's speshul blue eyes was very infuriating. Thirty pages in, and there were already more than twenty lines about the blueness of Aaron's eyes. His condescending and unfriendly manner was being overly mentioned too, to the extent that any word of his was being constituted as an insult directed at Lina. And his height. His stupid height. I didn't- and still don't- care if he was a million feet tall okay, just get on with the story. 

1 star for this book. I hated it so much that I would not wish it upon even my worst enemies. And hating it was made more depressing because of the pretty cover and the decent-sounding plot. 

What else is there to say? Just don't read this book. I mean-

Thank you Anne Marie for the inspiring (and very editable) lyrics.