I think I finally understand The Charm Offensive

So, today I’m talking about The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun. This is one of those books that I’ve known about for the longest time, like it’s always just been on my radar (The Saturdays tease), but I had just never gotten around to picking it up. But when I got a gift card, I figured it was finally time to give it a whirl.

The blurb says that the real love story happens behind the scenes. 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 realises 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.

So, yes, Dev is a producer on Ever After, which is basically The Bachelor, I think. I’ve never seen the show so I don’t actually know. But his own love life is a mess as he went through a messy breakup three months ago which we, conceptually, love to see. Even better? His ex also works on the show. Anyway, the POV then flits over to Charlie, bless him. You immediately see he’s massively anxiety riddled, and that he’s lost the company he founded. The whole opening of the show ends up being a mess as Charlie has to redo this one scene like ten times, and ends up vomiting on Dev’s shoes. Someone then invites one of the contestant’s boyfriends onto the show and he ends up clarting Charlie in the face. Still, Dev manages to get Charlie to believe he’ll find a soulmate on the show, wink wink, hint hint, I wonder who that could be? But then also at one point, Dev suggests that he and Charlie practice date, so that Charlie can be more comfortable in front of the camera and dating all the women he’s choosing between. We love tropes.

Charlie runs through that trope, when he’s reading the script that Dev has sent him, that he realises he’s never read anything about two men falling in love, and then he has this feeling in his chest… Hmm, I wonder what that could have been? But literally a couple pages later, you do get the answer to what is, obviously, is – that Charlie is into Dev. Given the whole concept of this romance book, it’s not exactly a surprise when it happens.

I think I definitely preferred Charlie’s POV over Dev’s. You see about a third of the way into the book that Charlie mentions to the reader that he’s never really felt much of a sexual attraction to anyone up until Dev in his life. It mentions that he’s had, like, abject sexual desires that involve women, but those had never really involved him. A part I appreciated was that the fact that it was an attraction to Dev that wasn’t the problem. I mean, it was, but it wasn’t the fact that Dev was a man that was the problem, it was more of Dev’s relationship to him in regards to the show that he found to be the problem. And you really got to see the inner workings of his brain too, which given his anxiety and OCD, I found to be much more of an interesting read than anything else in the book. I say that simply in the sense that I can find the mental health struggles Charlie had more relatable than I could the trying to successfully hold down a job in the entertainment field while also wrestling with Charlie that Dev had.

Something about the POVs. I think for me, because it was the first time I’ve read a book in present tense third person, I felt a little weird reading it. There were occasional spells of telling, rather than showing. I think I personally just prefer multiple POVs when it comes with first person, because when I, personally, feel like third person comes with the territory of the narrator being like, “This is what’s happening, and this is the truth”. I think first person makes it a lot easier to make the narrator unreliable, as it more often than not comes from the head of one of the characters, so when they think one thing is true, then it can be true to them, regardless of whether it’s the actual case of what’s true or not. One example I have specifically is when Charlie is talking to his agent, Parisa, about Dev, and Charlie is convinced that Dev doesn’t have a form of depression and Parisa presumes he does. This is where it links back to the third person, because the narrator was telling us that Dev didn’t, because that’s what Charlie thought. And, I don’t know, I just felt like it came off weird, because we’d seen the issues with Dev’s mental health from his POV. I think the third person comes off a bit detached from the characters. When you do see Dev’s depression, I think that perhaps having the first person rather than the third would have let you get a true, deep, look into it.

Something about straight up romance books. I think maybe partly because it was a book surrounding a reality show, there was almost some disconnect from the actual romance, especially towards the beginning. Although, I’m not saying this as a negative, Dev goes on this whole journey with his mental health. He’s very much the type of person that when one of his depressive episodes hit, he sort of just wallows in it and then when it’s over he’s like, “Lol… well, what now?” and moves on. And it wasn’t until maybe like the last third of this book, which, I know is more or less how a romance book is going to work, but in that last third, when the realisation hits Dev. Something about how because he works on this show about finding happy endings, he feels this detachment from Charlie, so when something bad ever happens between the two of them, Dev’s first thought was along the lines of, “This is a show about Charlie finding the love of his life”, despite not realising how fake the scripted reality show is.

I saw that this book had won something on Goodreads. I think it was like a romance of the year, or something to that effect. I will definitely say, this book absolutely gagged me towards the end, like, the last ten or twenty percent of the book were where it was at its strongest in my opinion. Because, I will say, the way that I thought this book was going to go was that, obviously, Dev and Charlie were going to get together, and the fact that Dev and Charlie were together while Charlie was the star of the show was going to be an issue, like they’d have to hide their relationship for a while. I thought that was going to be the conflict of this book, and that was partially true, that’s not completely what the conflict was, and that’s what I really appreciated at the end of this book, the trope that you’d normally expect for this genre of romance kind of got turned on its head and went in a way that I never thought it would do, so I absolutely see why it won the award that it did.

And here’s a very fun little closer to this post. I definitely enjoyed this book, and I don’t know why put off reading it for so long when I’d known about it for so long. Although, saying that, I still don’t think it’s one I’ll be rushing back to. It’ll be one of those that’ll sit on my shelf and I’ll be like, “Why haven’t I read this in so long, what happens?” and then I’ll re-read it.

Okay, bye!