AUTHOR: Elísabet Benavent
PUBLISHER: Debolsillo
GENRE: Contemporary Romance
READER’S NAME: Kathleen Monaghan
DATE: : June 11, 2020
Four girls in their late twenties living in Madrid are best friends. They all have professional jobs, wear nice clothes, don’t worry about money, and enjoy life as girls-about-town. Valeria, the narrator, has been married since her early twenties to Adrián. She’s trying to write her second novel, but it’s not going well. She quit her job to write after the success of her first novel, but now she suffers from writer’s block and spends her days slobbing around her apartment in pajamas and a messy bun.
Lola is in love with Sergio, her clandestine lover who has a girlfriend, but she pretends that she is just interested in the sex. Carmen is a country girl who’s worked very hard to make a successful career in Madrid. She secretly loves her co-worker Borja. Not-so-secretly, she and her boss, Daniel, hate each other intensely. Nerea is beautiful and very poised, and has a successful management career. She starts dating Carmen’s boss Daniel without realizing who he is.
Valeria’s husband Adrián has recently become distant. He works very hard at his photography business side-by-side with his much younger, big-breasted, and scantily clad assistant, Alex. Valeria is starting to suspect Alex may be more than just an assistant. She and Adrián haven’t been intimate in months and he keeps rejecting her advances. Out of desperation over the situation, she flirts with Víctor, a seductive friend of Lola’s.
As Adrián continues to reject her she accepts more of Víctor’s come-ons until one fateful night when she overhears Adrián and Alex having sex and, enraged, finds Víctor and has sex with him. The denouement occurs when Valeria and Adrián confront each other and they decide to separate because of their infidelities and unhappiness. Afterwards, Valeria finally loses her writer’s block, writes her next novel in two days, and sends it to her editor without rereading it. He loves it and sends her a warm, complimentary email.
The narration races from one explicit sex scene to another, followed by the four women gathering for drinks or brunch to chat about their romantic relationships and sexual exploits. The endless series of scenes of the four women talking sex over drinks or brunch, with Valeria as the first-person narrator as well as the omniscient narrator of her friends’ lives, evokes the style of the American TV series Sex and the City based on the book by Candace Bushnell.
Aside from the sex scenes, the book lacks any concrete or detailed descriptions of the women’s physical environment or of their interior lives. The one-dimensional characters move like cardboard cutouts from brunch, to bed, to drinks, to work, to bed.
It would be easy to translate this book. Even though it takes place in Madrid, the plot could have happened, more or less, in any large American city. The book deals with a common theme in a predictable way. The plot is very predictable and linear. The dialogue is plausible, although the male characters are a bit unbelievable. They speak and behave and react to the women in the story the way that women would wish that men would speak, behave, and react. They do not read like realistic portrayals of actual men.
En los zapatos de Valeria reads like a knock-off of Sex and the City, but without the social commentary and philosophizing that made Bushnell’s book interesting. The characters are very shallow and the plot is thin, but if it were a TV show it could probably be made more interesting. It’s not a work of literature, but people who enjoy romance novels with graphic sex scenes would probably enjoy En los zapatos de Valeria. Like Sex and the City, the Valeria novels have been televised. Netflix debuted Valeria May 8, 2020.
Elísabet Benavent has published at least 19 books, all of which appear to be contemporary romance novels told from the point of view of a woman in her twenties. En los zapatos de Valeria is the first of four novels in the Saga Valeria.
Benavent got her start self-publishing her books on Amazon.com, but they proved so popular that Penguin Random House picked them up. According to Amazon.com, people who purchased Elísabet Benavent novels also purchased novels by Megan Maxwell and Sylvia Day, who also write contemporary romance novels, and E.L. James of the Fifty Shades of Grey books.
