“Life-altering moments spanned from a few seconds to decades. It was part of the magic of life. Of living.”

The Spanish Love Deception is a debut romance from Elena Armas, and starts out with workplace tension between our MCs Lina and Aaron, then goes into fake dating and a sister’s wedding in Spain. The fake dating and tension between the characters is well done, and I enjoyed seeing their romance blossom over the second half of the book. The overall story is a cute idea, albeit very The Hating Game. However, there was significantly more sexism in the workplace in this book, and the workplace scenarios at the beginning were dragged out for quite awhile, extending this book to 479 pages. This was the main issue our buddy read had… none of the men stood up for Lina when she was experiencing some pretty awful situations at work… even our main man, Aaron. Aaron also refused to work with Lina right when she started at the office, and was pretty demanding when they finally got together later in the book. I get that the author might want to make him more unlikable for the enemies-to-lovers storyline, but his actions just made their relationship a bit more unpalatable. This was more of a “like” book for me, but it did win the Goodreads Best Debut of 2021 award.