Musings: Elena Armas' The Spanish Love Deception

I did not expect myself to begin voicing my unwarranted opinions on the internet by this book. Yet, here I am. The first book I started and finished in 2024.

Expected a lot of love, and a lot of deception.

I don’t like spoilers. There won’t be any. Except the fact that this book does not comply with this plea. First chapter and the whole set of spoilers are laid bare for you. If there are any.

The book is a romance between our characters Lina and Aaron. This book’s plot is the concoction of best-selling romance tropes of all time. Reminds me of the movie I watched with my bestie. This movie “The Hating Game” ends in first 20 minutes or so. But the producers felt otherwise. They experimented with movie ending a dozen times in 102 minutes. We both were tired by the final “producer” end. But yes, we did finish watching it. Loyal romantics. Slightly foolish, but loyal.

One word to describe the book: Verbose. The book leaves nothing to the imagination. Everything is printed for you. A very low effort read. The internal monologues, which the protagonist often verbalized, were unnecessary. The amount of “repeated descriptions” provided in the book made the plot and characters depthless. There is no character development for anyone, even the protagonist. Most of the book feels dragged. The last few chapters feel rushed. Few feeble attempts to leave no loose strings were made. Still, most of it feels unnecessary. This book required a few more rounds of editing.

The good side to being verbose is being a perfect source for a “drinking game”. Take a sip at every time you read “big, muscular, blue, deep, jaw, hair, hard”. The one word which can be borderline deadly for this game is “eyes”. You have been warned.

Criticism aside, I found this book to be an extremely easy read. If there is someone like me, who is in a period of reading/watching slump, likes rom-coms and doesn’t mind mindless reads, this book could be good.

The amount of dialogues this book has makes me think it could have been a play. Play could have put it in an interesting light. Or maybe it was really written as a script for a movie. (Notes while editing: The news on the author’s website states that it will be adapted to a movie. That explains it.)

The one activity I enjoyed while reading this book was translating all curse words of Spanish. But don’t be fooled. Most places, the Spanish is translated for you. Hence, minimal effort read.

My reading experience is aptly described by Lina in Chapter 16:

“Nope. I hadn’t been unprepared for that. I had been completely defenseless.”

Double negatives on steroids. Whatever it is supposed to mean.

I rate it blue eyes out of 10.

-Best from S