The Spanish Love Deception

Written By Linda Malek

The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas

Reviewed by Tanya
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A wedding. A trip to Spain. The most infuriating man. And three days of pretending. Will Lina’s plan work?

Catalina (Lina) Martín is finally, “not single”. Her family is ecstatic that she’s bringing her American boyfriend to her sister’s wedding where everyone is invited to bear witness to the event of the year!
Meet Aaron Blackford - the man whose main purpose in life was to get under Lina’s skin - has just offered himself to be her date despite being a right jerk and calling himself her best option. Is it worth the headache to bring her unbearable colleague as her fake boyfriend to her sister’s wedding? Or is she better off admitting the truth?

First of all I have to shout out the one hijabi girl who was literally screaming about this book on tiktok…I’ve never ordered a book so quickly in my life!! I love how crazy everyone has been going over this book and it definitely deserves the hype! It’s very rare for me to find a book that grips you from page 1 but this was everything and more! If you guys want that cute/steamy NOT YA type of chick lit then this is the one! For all you guys who were gushing over Christian Grey, you will be hyperventilating over Aaron Blackford. I have never enjoyed reading reviews and watching booktok explode over a book as much as I have this one!

It was a perfect paced book. It wasn’t rushed, or a slow burner or filled with fake dating tropes. The tension and chemistry between Lina and Aaron is off the charts. It felt somewhat real as they didn’t just jump from enemies to lovers but from enemies – friends – lovers.

But there is also a lot of depth to the story. I thought it handled the topics of trust, grief, family pressures, and sexism in the workplace very well. This book is relatable as much as it is enjoyable. Everything just falls into place so perfectly by the end of it that I had this big fat grin on my face and was ready to start reading it from page 1 again!

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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