the spanish love deception
a review.
i’m back with another book review for my fellow book lovers. in these, i basically just go into depth about the book rather than sticking to the constraints of a 3 minute tiktok video or a short good reads review!
this week, i read The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas. you probably know by now that i am a whore for a romance novel. there is just something about reading about love that excites me more than actually leaving my room to go out into the real world and experience love.
there were so many moments in The Spanish Love Deception where i just looked at the page and thought “damn, she’s just like me”. stubborn, chronic over-thinker, has to be the best at what they do… you get the picture. but i love reading about women like that. especially in the case of The Spanish Love Deception, where Lina is the only woman on her team of men. that’s how the book starts, you’re immediately thrown into Lina’s world of work and not even a few pages in she’s already experiencing the workplace micro-agressions that we face as women of colour. love stories where the woman doesn’t have the privilege of race and wealth hit home a lot more with me.
Lina and Aaron have the classic enemies to lovers trope but also the fake dating trope, which as I have mentioned before, I am not a fan of fake dating unless it is the form of Olive and Adam in The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. the slow burn in The Spanish Love Deception however, is ridiculous. the majority of the book is spent with them being enemies with a sprinkle of hope for love. despite how long it takes for the book to go beyond the slightly tiring, one-sided resentment story that goes on, the minute the book gets good - it gets GOOD and then it dies again. before reading it, I was told to expect smut and the book did not disappoint. however, I do have to say: I absolutely despise when men (both in real life and in books) call women “good girl”. nothing makes me wretch more than that phrase. immediately done! it feels like something needs to be unpacked there, it is not a term of endearment unless you are my teacher or i am your 3 year old child learning how to walk (is that when kids start walking? I actually have no idea).
I have 4 major complaints about The Spanish Love Deception: 1) it really is 100 pages longer than it needed to be. I have never rolled my eyes more than I did when I thought I was done with the book only to read “one year later” on the next page. 2) okay we get it Lina, he’s going to be your boss. I, as the reader, do not need to keep reading it every other paragraph. 3) MY GOD, DID HE USE AN EXPIRED CONDOM? TWICE? and 4) why is the author so obsessed with the word trepidation? spice it up bae, use a thesaurus or something idk.
to be quite honest, the book could’ve been a lot shorter if Aaron had just told Lina how he felt from the get go and/or Lina addressed the issues she had. it just dragged. a lot. the smut was good. there were key points that i liked, for example, the wedding. but the best parts of the book take place in Spain and only last a few chapters. compared to the rest of the book that just seems to never end. it would normally take me about a day and a half, maybe two at most, to read a book like The Spanish Love Deception but it took me five days because I had no desire to pick it up. it was almost as if each chapter was just the previous chapter but in a different font.
its a cute read with a bit of intense smut but do be warned, some of the smut is actually incredibly cringe. maybe it was an outright awful book and I just get turned on too easily but i’d give it a solid 3 stars (a not so solid 2.75 stars).