The Charm Offensive
Dev Deshpande has spent his career at Ever After, America's premier romance reality show, polishing a fairy-tale formula he still believes in even as his own love life quietly falls apart. Charlie Winshaw is the season's reluctant Prince Charming, a tech wunderkind trying to rehabilitate his image after a professional meltdown, and he is deeply unsuited to the role. He is awkward with the cameras, miserable on the group dates, and far more at ease talking to his producer than to any of the contestants he is supposed to fall for. As Dev coaches Charlie through the season, the two men discover an unexpected closeness, and the show's tidy script begins to feel like the wrong story about the wrong couple. Alison Cochrun's debut pairs tender, frank attention to anxiety and OCD with the candy-colored machinery of reality TV.
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Anxious tech wunderkind Charlie Winshaw goes on a Bachelor-style reality dating show to rebuild his image. His handler, producer Dev Deshpande, is a hopeless romantic and starts to realize the wrong person is falling in love.
The Charm Offensive contains some on-page content but is restrained, around 2 to 3 out of 5 on the spice scale. The romance is between two contestants on a Bachelor-style reality TV show.
The Charm Offensive contains some on-page content but is restrained, around 2 to 3 out of 5 on the spice scale. The romance is between two contestants on a Bachelor-style reality TV show.
The Charm Offensive is a standalone, but Alison Cochrun has written additional connected queer romcoms including Kiss Her Once for Me and Here We Go Again.
The Charm Offensive was written by Alison Cochrun, published in 2021 by Atria Books.
The Charm Offensive is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Charm Offensive takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Charm Offensive is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.