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A review by meripm
The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas
1.0
90. 90 is the number of times Aaron's blue eyes were mentioned. I could end the review here and I'd hope this was enough to explain how bad this was, but I'll continue.
This book was so irritating. Like, SO irritating. If it had a good editor, it'd have been a good 150 pages shorter, because GOD there was so much rambling and stream of consciousness that repeated the same three things over and over. The characters were flat and stereotypical, the book used every cliché known to man, and the writing style was bad, to put it simply. There was no chemistry between the main characters and the dialogues were constant odes to how wonderful the characters were or how they felt about one another. They felt SO artificial and nothing was flowing naturally at all.
Time also passed to the convenience of the author, which was extremely confusing. Take the weekend they spend in Spain, for example. It is said that Aaron only takes the afternoon off, no more time off than that, so they leave on Friday afternoon. Flights from New York to Madrid take seven hours if they go smoothly, and they go to Asturias, which takes at least two flights! The time difference also adds 6h to this trip, so at the VERY least they would have arrived to Asturias well into the night on Friday, but somehow they arrive in the middle of the day for that Wedding Cup thing. We need to assume then that they arrive early on Saturday, but they take a day to relax between the bachelorette party and the wedding, so the wedding happens on... Monday???? But they came to Spain for the weekend???
There were so many repetitions, both in content and in style, because it was clear the author's vocabulary wasn't that rich (between pages 335 and 392 the author uses the expression "zero in on" eight times, and some of them are in the exact same page! Use synonyms ffs! Also what's up with calling people by their full name and surname constantly on informal situations?
Also, Charo never came back home after the wedding finished well into the night because plot. The writer couldn't have two sex scenes in that house otherwise. Despite highlighting how nosy and ever present Charo was in every other scene in the apartment, she just vanishes in the middle of the night so they can bang each other. She's also not there in the morning, either.
But this is not all! I'm Spanish, so I can tell you 100% sure that despite the author being Spanish, there were punctuation mistakes all over in the stuff that was written in Spanish. And I'm not just talking about the absolute zero times ¿ and ¡ were used to open sentences (because I know there is a possibility they were edited out), but the Spanish parts of this book also capitalized words randomly, were missing commas, and did not stay consistent with what was said in Spanish and what wasn't at ALL. All the accents were in place though, which makes it more apparent that these mistakes were never spotted or considered at all, which I frankly find unacceptable for a published novel.
This book was so irritating. Like, SO irritating. If it had a good editor, it'd have been a good 150 pages shorter, because GOD there was so much rambling and stream of consciousness that repeated the same three things over and over. The characters were flat and stereotypical, the book used every cliché known to man, and the writing style was bad, to put it simply. There was no chemistry between the main characters and the dialogues were constant odes to how wonderful the characters were or how they felt about one another. They felt SO artificial and nothing was flowing naturally at all.
Time also passed to the convenience of the author, which was extremely confusing. Take the weekend they spend in Spain, for example. It is said that Aaron only takes the afternoon off, no more time off than that, so they leave on Friday afternoon. Flights from New York to Madrid take seven hours if they go smoothly, and they go to Asturias, which takes at least two flights! The time difference also adds 6h to this trip, so at the VERY least they would have arrived to Asturias well into the night on Friday, but somehow they arrive in the middle of the day for that Wedding Cup thing. We need to assume then that they arrive early on Saturday, but they take a day to relax between the bachelorette party and the wedding, so the wedding happens on... Monday???? But they came to Spain for the weekend???
There were so many repetitions, both in content and in style, because it was clear the author's vocabulary wasn't that rich (between pages 335 and 392 the author uses the expression "zero in on" eight times, and some of them are in the exact same page! Use synonyms ffs! Also what's up with calling people by their full name and surname constantly on informal situations?
Also, Charo never came back home after the wedding finished well into the night because plot. The writer couldn't have two sex scenes in that house otherwise. Despite highlighting how nosy and ever present Charo was in every other scene in the apartment, she just vanishes in the middle of the night so they can bang each other. She's also not there in the morning, either.
But this is not all! I'm Spanish, so I can tell you 100% sure that despite the author being Spanish, there were punctuation mistakes all over in the stuff that was written in Spanish. And I'm not just talking about the absolute zero times ¿ and ¡ were used to open sentences (because I know there is a possibility they were edited out), but the Spanish parts of this book also capitalized words randomly, were missing commas, and did not stay consistent with what was said in Spanish and what wasn't at ALL. All the accents were in place though, which makes it more apparent that these mistakes were never spotted or considered at all, which I frankly find unacceptable for a published novel.