A review by jadejade
The Spanish Love Deception, by Elena Armas
3.0
I wanted to love this but in the end I wasn't quite the right reader.
There is an unusually long set up for a romance (noting that at 450+ pages it is a long romance novel), and I found the dynamic between the leads puzzling at first. About half way through it clicked in my neurodivergent head: think of it as a romance between a stereotypical ADHD person and a masking autistic person. Suddenly it all made sense to me, although I am most certainly projecting. And although this new perspective helped me, there were some aspects of the novel that bothered enough to prevent a higher rating: the text fat-shames an antagonist (he wears a shirt at least two sizes too small from memory - did we need this detail?) and some of the trauma that the protagonist describes inadvertently triggered me (this is not the author's fault, I was surprised by my own intense reaction tbh). I still enjoyed a lot of scenes but I didn't fall in love with the novel like most of the universe seemed to, alas.
There is an unusually long set up for a romance (noting that at 450+ pages it is a long romance novel), and I found the dynamic between the leads puzzling at first. About half way through it clicked in my neurodivergent head: think of it as a romance between a stereotypical ADHD person and a masking autistic person. Suddenly it all made sense to me, although I am most certainly projecting. And although this new perspective helped me, there were some aspects of the novel that bothered enough to prevent a higher rating: the text fat-shames an antagonist (he wears a shirt at least two sizes too small from memory - did we need this detail?) and some of the trauma that the protagonist describes inadvertently triggered me (this is not the author's fault, I was surprised by my own intense reaction tbh). I still enjoyed a lot of scenes but I didn't fall in love with the novel like most of the universe seemed to, alas.