Alison Cochrun is a high school English teacher living outside Portland, Oregon. When she's not reading and writing queer love stories, you can find her torturing teenagers with Shakespeare, crafting perfect travel itineraries, hate-watching reality dating shows, and searching for the best happy hour nachos. You can find her on Instagram or at her website www.alisoncochrun.com.
Dev Deshpande has always believed in fairy tales. So it's no wonder that he's spent his career crafting them on the long-running reality dating show Ever After. As the most successful producer in the franchise's history, Dev always scripts the perfect love story for his contestants, even as his own love life crashes and burns. But then the show casts disgraced tech wunderkind Charlie Winshaw as its star. Charlie is far from the romantic Prince Charming Ever After expects. He doesn't believe in true love and agreed to appear on the show only as a last-ditch effort to rehabilitate his image. In front of the cameras, he's a stiff, anxious mess with no idea how to date twenty women on national television. As Dev fights to get Charlie to connect with the contestants on a whirlwind worldwide tour, they begin to open up to each other, and Charlie realizes he has better chemistry with Dev than with his costars. But even reality TV has a script, and in order to find their way to happily ever after, they'll have to reconsider whose love story gets told and why.
Charlie's and Dev's romances was one of the most organic and natural love stories that I've read in a while. I was so engrossed in the book, I didn't want to get up to turn my lights on when it suddenly got dark, and I truly felt like I was part of their world while reading the book. I was invested in Charlie and Dev finding the way to stay together, and part of the reason for that was because I was truly interested in the commentary Cochrun was making about mental health. In fact, knowing that the author actually followed a parallel journey to her characters in getting help and being vulnerable with other people made Dev's and Charlie's stories that much more rich in emotion. Sure, the book is humorous and entertaining and sparkling, and yes the romantic moments Dev and Charlie share together are just the perfect amount of that butterfly feeling, but the reason we got so invested in them is because we wanted both of them to be healthy, and to know they were worthy of love by the end—and Cochrun does deliver on that! Their journeys can only end as perfectly as they do once they realize that they need to get help and need to create their own happily ever after for themselves. The re-assignment of agency and the decision to actively pursue what they want in the face of adversity is exactly what makes The Charm Offensive the contemporary romance all contemporary romance readers want to read.
One of my absolute favorite parts about this novel is the way that it doesn't always have all the words, and goes to show that you don't always need to. The novel is full of the characters having really honest conversations with one another about anxiety and mental health and sexuality, and debating over the merits of always having the right words. I hate this idea that everything in books has to be carefully articulated, that everything has to be explained, because not even in real life do we always have the words to describe what we're feeling. Expecting characters and authors to have those words doesn't give space for the characters or stories to just be. If characters share what they're thinking and feeling honestly (even if their feelings aren't clearly or carefully articulated), so many more people will feel seen and represented. Cochrun provides validity on both sides of this, especially when it comes to labels and sexuality. There are positives to labeling and finding yourself within a community, but this idea that it's necessary can feel like one is being boxed in by a set of standards, which doesn't always work for everyone. You don't always need to define yourself or define your feelings for other people to understand—like Dev and Charlie learn, it's better to just say what you're feeling and make the promise and commitment to stay.
Reality TV is a huge part of this novel—it's the backdrop for Dev's and Charlie's love story, and it's also the push both of them need to realize that they are valid and deserving of love and a healthy lifestyle. That being said, you can feel the amount of research the author must have done about reality TV and their inner workings to faithfully portray an exciting and devastating workplace environment. Even longtime fans of shows might be shocked by the way producers are treated, and just how much manipulation is involved to get the "television" producers want to see. Quite easily this could be treated as an exposé on reality TV and all its dark aspects, and the way in which reality TV dehumanizes every single person involved in the process—from the stars we see to the hardworking people behind the camera. This faithful portrayal of reality TV was really useful, though, in understanding both Dev's and Charlie's mental spaces. Without the intensity and rigor of this industry, neither of them would have faced the hard choices and spaces they needed to to realize they were valid and needed help. I thought Cochrun did a wonderful job portraying this work environment, and incorporating the characters within it.
Some elements of the craft and structure of the novel stood out to me as making this book fun and refreshing from just reading straight prose. The present tense of the novel itself was a little off-putting at first, usually because a lot of the contemporary romance I read is in past tense—but it was very easy to get over that little bump, and found that present tense was probably best to write in considering the relevance of the journey of finding help for oneself in the moment. The mid-chapter point-of-view switches were also a bit jarring at first, but once you realize the book is set up and split up in the weeks of filming, it makes sense as to why those are necessary. Instead of breaking the novel into unnecessary parts, the mid-chapter point-of-view switches help with seeing a situation from both Dev's and Charlie's angles. The last fun thing I loved that Cochrun incorporated were the scripts that fell after each week of shooting chapter. This broke up the prose, and allowed us to get to know some of the women on the show. It was also a quick break of humor, too, and a way to build up the world of reality TV that's not just coming from Dev's and Charlie's experience.
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*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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