romance
Lina needs to find a date to accompany her at her sister’s
wedding in Spain. She can’t show up
alone because her ex-boyfriend is the groom’s brother and he is now engaged. Since she’s not had any relationships since the breakup and is
desperate to appear happy to her concerned family, she agrees to let her most annoying
coworker, Aaron, pretend to be her boyfriend at the wedding. He’s attractive
but they do not get along.
I read The Spanish Love Deception because it was the
Goodreads Choice 2021 Winner for Debut Novel. While the novel did, eventually
win me over, I did consider not finishing it at one point. Therefore, I disagree with this
award achievement. The characters never
felt real. They were caricatures of people. Lina was so incredibly out of
touch. She was ridiculously not self-aware.
Aaron was strongly lacking in social
skills and personality. He was like a robot. (Lina even referred to him as Mr.
Robot sometimes, after I wrote that sentence!) I felt that the characters were
built to fit into the story rather than the story built around realistic
characters. While I often enjoy romance
novels, I rarely like them when you know the first two characters you meet are
the ones who will end up together.
Despite the contrived nature of the story and the fact
that I really didn’t like the characters, they finally started
developing interesting back stories. And then I wanted to watch the wedding
weekend play out. By then I was about 2/3 of the way through and caught in the
romance. So, I guess I jumped on the story train at some point. I ended up
liking the book. But I would never have picked Elena Armas' novel as the Best Debut Novel in 2021. Not even close. Aaron’s personality never did make sense
(because he had to be crowbarred in to fit the narrative) and the Armas re-used the same adjectives throughout the story.
The audiobook narrator was Scarlette Hayes. She was a great voice actor but didn’t have much of a vocal repertoire. She
was good with Spanish. I’ll give her an
A-.
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