By Sharman I
Upon the insistence of my daughter, I caved in to purchasing this highly publicised, 500 odd page, debut novel by Elena Armas. The 500+ pages should have been a sign of sorts that this was going to be book I wasn’t going to enjoy. A deterrent.
Before purchasing any book, I always look up the ratings. This boasted an excellent 4/5, 268,144 ratings and 4.05 stars. It had the telltales of an AWESOME novel and I really wanted to love this book. But truth be told, I skimmed through pages, skipped many a chapter and I DID NOT finish the book. Something I didn’t ever do with books I’ve not quite liked in the past. In fact, when I saw a lady purchasing this at a local bookstore I came so close to telling her not to. It was downright traumatic reading this.
Let me share why this book has instilled a fear in me of trusting reviews. To begin with, the introductory chapter was rather far fetched. Why would anyone offer to accompany you to a family wedding when you clearly never asked for the favour?
The main character, Catalina or Lina spent many a times with internal monologues and these monologues were frustratingly long. It seemed like the author needed to build on the paragraphs, conversations to make sure she made a 400 odd page book. To make it worst, the monologues was playing on loop. It was literally repeated at every alternate page along with the word smug.
Meant to an enemies-to-lover style novel, it wasn’t anything close to it. Aaron was poorly characterised. Every time he appeared, I expected my heart to flutter but I cringed.
The dialogues between the lead characters were bungled and it was downright boring. The author tried very hard to keep this going but it was a rather sad attempt. If I could rate this below 1, I would have done it without a blink. It may be your cup of tea, but splurging RM49.90, I hope you’d at least get hold of the e-book version. At half the price, there’d perhaps be no regrets.