Another modern romance in which people go on reality TV to make friends: review of The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun

The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun is a charming book.  The plot is silly: A Bachelor-like show somehow casts a bachelor who suffers from fairly severe OCD and anxiety.  I know these shows have all kinds of issues, and maybe such a person could slip through casting as a contestant (is that what you call the women?  I don't really watch these shows), but not as the bachelor.

Producer Dev is assigned to be Charlie's minder.  Dev has his own issues, including sometimes debilitating depression.  

This book deals with all the multi-hyphenate mental health/ethnic identity/sexual preference/gender identity issues exhaustively.  

The conflict in the book is that Charlie is contractually obligated to get engaged to one of the contestants at the end of the season, and Dev is contractually obligated to not get involved with the cast, but Charlie and Dev fall in luurve.  

You can see the happily-ever-after coming from the beginning of the book.  SPOILERS (SORT OF)

Everyone (except for the minor character forgettable villain) works together to transform The Bachelor, (or whatever it's called in the novel) into an inclusive show that features Charlie and Dev this season, and next season will have an out lesbian as the main character.  (I know there has been talk of having a gay bachelor but I don't believe anyone has actually done that -- for the obvious reason that the 20 contestants will have no reason to fall in love with the bachelor when they can fall in love with each other.)  

Even though their names are very different (thank you for that) and their hyphenate issues mostly different (Charlie's anxiety versus Dev's depression), I found these characters difficult to tell apart.  I often had to really focus to remind myself whose head we were in at any given time.  They both loved the other and then pulled back, reminded themselves of why they weren't worthy, had best friends who had their backs, and on and on.  

That said, this book was much more sweet than offensive.  

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