Book 4/30.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Up until Chapter 23 on page 378, this was a 2 star read. And then, enter the long-awaited smut in chapter 23 and it was sooo damn good that it elevated my rating to 3 stars.
I need to start by saying that I am not a fan of smut. Hell I didn’t even know what smut was until I Googled it a couple of days ago. I don’t know why but reading sex scenes in books makes me very uncomfortable and I tend to skim through them, if not skip them altogether. This time around, for reasons unknown, I decided to read Aaron and Lina’s 22-page sex scene word for word and boy am I glad I did! Elena Armas made us wait 377 pages for the smut, but goddamnit it was worth it! I don’t know if it was because I had smoked up and was listening to Red (Taylor’s version) but holy shit Aaron and Lina getting it on turned me the fuck on!!! So much so that those 22 pages of smut upped my rating from 2 stars to 3.
That said, my problem with The Spanish Love Deception, and why it was this close (👌) to a 2 star rating was that the enemies-to-lovers trope was not done well. AT ALL!!! It is made perfectly clear from the beginning that Aaron is into Catalina, yet we have to put up with Lina pretending she doesn’t see it for wayyy too many pages! Because TSLD is just wayyy too long. My edition is 468 pages long yet it could have, and should have, been no more than 300 pages. Those extra 168 pages were filled with nothing but Lina going on and on and on and on and on and on and on (you get it) about how there is no way their fake dating arrangement could be real, when it so clearly was. I mean, Aaron offered to be her fake date at a wedding in SPAIN! Who does that unless they are into you?! That should have tipped Lina off, but nope. It was like Lina was dedicated to not seeing that Aaron was into her, which was cute at first but got tedious real quick.
Also, this book is called The Spanish Love Deception yet it took half the book for them to finally get to Spain. Which was a damn waste because the Martín clan had some interesting characters, but they came in too late and as a result there was not enough time to really enjoy them.
I wanted to love this. I really did. But it was just sooo annoying and BORING having to read pages and pages of Lina’s internal dialogue that is basically just the same thought repeated over and over again. If you want to read an office enemies-to-lovers trope done right, then I highkey recommend The Hating Game. And if you want to read fake dating done right, then I highkey recommend the pure, unadulterated perfection that is The Love Hypothesis. TSLD and The Love Hypothesis were my two choices for the last book of my 2022 reading challenge and I am beyond glad I picked the latter, because this would have ended my reading challenge on a low note.
View all my reviews
** A guide to ratings **
1 star – did not like it
2 stars – it was okay
3 stars – liked it
4 stars – really liked it
5 stars – it was amazing
Lwile the Leo 