The Charm Offensive

Score: 5/5 Bookmarks

Steam Level: 🍆🍆🍆 /5

Thank you to Atria books for gifting me a review copy of The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun. This book is absolutely making my top ten list of the year. I don’t think I could have loved it more.

Think Bachelor and the UnREAL TV show combined…but better. The drama is there, both on and off ‘screen’, it’s a search for a happy ever after, but the characters are so much more loveable and real and amazing than any actual humans I’ve seen on a reality tv show.

Dev has been working on the reality dating show Ever After for years, and he’s in love with the idea of that happily ever after…even though it’s often produced on the show. But this season he’s just broken up with his long-term boyfriend (who also works on the show) and his mental health has been sorely neglected lately.

Charlie is this season’s Prince Charming on the show, and is there to revive his image rather than find love. Plus he doesn’t actually like any of the women on the show very much, at least not ‘like that’. Does he even like women at all? He’s never really stopped to ask himself that question until Dev walks into his life.

I really don’t want to give too much away because you absolutely, positively need to read this book if you haven’t already. It’s just so SO good! It honestly had me laughing and crying in equal measure, and even though I’ve already read it, I’m downloading the audiobook today so I can experience it all over again in a different format.

Dev Deshpande has always believed in fairy tales. So it’s no wonder then 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 only agreed to the show 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. Behind the scenes, he’s cold, awkward, and emotionally closed-off.

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 any of his female co-stars. But even reality TV has a script, and in order to find to happily ever after, they’ll have to reconsider whose love story gets told.