Books 2024: The Spanish Love Deception

Romance July Book Review 2024: The Spanish Love Deception

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Genre:Romance , young-adult fiction
Ratings:3.5/5

The Thriving Love Between The Lies

"They both are enemies but there's a saying, "Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer."

The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas is a teenage dream, a perfect blend of slow-burn and enemies to lovers, that follows the cliche path of fake dating.

I have always been a sucker for Office Romance and if you throw in the competition and head-to-head sassy banters the book perfectly hits the nostalgia for those readers who enjoyed The Hating Game By Sally Thorne.

Catalina Martin, the Spanish hell-fire holds the grudge for her co-worker Aaron Blackford. It's quite a long and silly one but you can't help but relate to her. No one would love to be in the presence of the person who claims to find you unworthy.

But here comes the twist, Catalina's luck threw her a curveball and she delivered it perfectly with the white lies of a lovey-dovey American boyfriend. In four weeks, she'll be flying back to Spain to attend the wedding of her sister and she needs a date more precisely the 'American Boyfriend'

But who could be that mad to fly to cross the ocean to attend a wedding with someone they know little about?

Here comes our Superman, the blue-eyed Clark Kent, one and only Aaron Blackford who according to Lina has lost his mind to suggest that he's her best option not that he's lying.

So now Aaron has become a personal Superman for our Lina flying with her to Spain as her American boyfriend. He's a man of his word, but with Lina and her family, no one knows when the words become twisted and test the restraint of Aaron on both situations and his growing closeness to Lina.

What I Liked about Aarlina and Elena:

Catalina took measures as big as bringing her co-worker to the wedding to be her boyfriend, but apart from cliches let us consider what real-world situation hides there.

In Real Life, women take the burn of fallout relationships, where both man and woman are equally involved in whatever occurs in their relationship, but the breakup by default is blamed on the woman.
It gets hard for them to move on with life when every other person seems to either pity or advise on what occurred.

Whereas a man can easily leave the mess behind on high tide for the women to sort out, somehow I relate to Lina, where she had to change the whole country to move on not from the breakup but from the aftermath that followed her every step in her hometown.

It gets hard to trust when you have bad taste in what you before believed was a delight.

And there comes Aaron not only his physical stability and appearance make him the greenest flag out there. But also how he was emotionally available and stable for Lina to become the shoulder for her to lean on, where she felt safe enough to be herself and not to be on her guard all the time.

Aaron wasn’t born with this perfection, his own experience had taught him and shaped him into the Aaron Blackford we swoon over. He had his skeletons, now that’s what human nature is all about.

Everyone has their skeletons in the closet and that’s what appealed to me about Aarlina.

Armas perfectly, subtly added the human flaws, the blend of reality into the world of the book.

My Experience with The Book

At 468 pages, the book burnt me out. I was putting it down more than picking it up in the first half. Elena's debut book did well, but the book was stretched too much till page 239 when I finally summoned some interest to continue it. I got this book as a Valentine's gift when I was a 15-year gal, with an obsession with Wattpad at that time.
Elena understood the assignment, and Aaron's piercing ocean-blue eyes seemed to have their fanbase. I drooled a bit,( I could relate to Lina in so many ways when the concern was of Aaron and his Greek body) which is my guilty bookish secret when Armas writes on pages and pages describing Aaron's shirtless shenanigans

This book is a good head-dive start for those who want to test their toes into the deep ocean of romance genre and cliches. All I have to say is prepare yourself to be added to drooling bookish secret, to be swooned by Aaron Blackford and add him to your never-ending list of Book Boyfriend.

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