Jay Coles, left and Alison Cochrun
Cochrun’s Charm runs too long; Coles’ Things offers pleasant surprises
TERRI SCHLICHENMEYER | Bookworm Sez
BookwormSez@yahoo.com
The Charm Offensive: A Novel by Alison Cochrun, c.2021, Atria; $17; 368 pages.
The applause is all for you this time. It’s deafening, really — perhaps because there’s a standing ovation beneath it. All the work you did, the emoting, the emotions — you know how much your fans appreciate it.
So take a bow. Drink in the love.
As in the new novel, The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun, that’s one thing that’s sometimes missing in life.
Dev Deshpande was good at his job. He knew it; his colleagues knew it. It was fact. He might personally be terrible at love — case in point: He was still smarting from a three-months-ago break-up with his boyfriend, Ryan — but Dev was a pro at his job as producer for the reality TV show, Ever After. In fact, he’d been in charge of making dreams happen for six years’ worth of beautiful Ever After contestants.
It helped that he believed in fairy tales. Maybe one day, he’d find his own Prince Charming.
Just not this season.
This season, his lead director made him handle the “prince” instead of the usual “princesses,” and that was a challenge.
Charles Winshaw was 28, devastatingly handsome, extremely wealthy and a nervous, introverted nerd who rarely dated. Geeky, awkward and prone to panic attacks, Charlie sincerely had no clue how to be romantic. Truth was, he was only there because his best friend and agent put him on Ever After to counter a reputation for being weird.
Still, Charlie was weird, and it was up to Dev to make him work for the show. Shoring up Charlie’s confidence didn’t work and neither did a pep talk. He couldn’t seem to just perform a role without freaking out, and it was becoming obvious.
By the time Dev’s assistant suggested having a few practice dates, Dev was willing to try anything.
He took Charlie to dinner. He spent time doing jigsaw puzzles with him, and he got Charlie to relax a little. If sparks flew, well, it was one-sided; Charlie was completely straight.
Wasn’t he?
You know what’s going to happen in the end, don’t you? Of course, you do. You’ll know it by page 30 — step-by-step, with virtually no surprises — which leaves a long way to the final sentence of The Charm Offensive.
Now, it’s true that this novel is cute. It has its lightly humorous moments, and author Alison Cochrun gives it a good cast, from contestant to show creator. It doesn’t lack details; in fact, reality dating show-watchers will feel right at home here.
It even has the ubiquitous panoply of exotic locales for the “challenges” that the contestants must do.
At issue is the length of this book. There’s too much of it — too many shirts that creep up, too many mentions of vomit, too much needless drama, too much will-he-won’t-he when we know full well he will.
This extra doesn’t ratchet up the tension, it makes things slow.
And so: cute story, familiar scenes, good characters in The Charm Offensive. But if taut is what you want in a rom-com, leave this book and bow out.
Things We Couldn’t Say by Jay Coles, c.2021, Scholastic; $18.99; 320 pages.
You’d like an explanation, please. Why something is done or not? Why permission is denied? You’d like to hear a simple reason. You’ve been asking “Why?” since you were two years old, but now the older you get, the more urgent is the need to know, although, in the new book Things We Couldn’t Say by Jay Coles, there could be a dozen becauses.
Sometimes, mostly when he didn’t need it to happen, Giovanni Zucker’s birth mother took over his thoughts. It wasn’t as though she was the only thing he had to think about.
Gio was an important part of the basketball team at Ben Davis High School; in fact, when he thought about college, he hoped for a basketball scholarship. He had classes to study for, two best friends he wanted to hang out with, a little brother who was his reason to get up in the morning and a father who was always pushing for help at the church he ran.
As for his romantic life, there wasn’t much to report: Gio dated girls, and he’d dated guys, and he was kinda feeling like he liked guys more.
So no, he didn’t want to think about his birth mother; the woman who walked out on the family when Gio was a little kid didn’t deserve his consideration at all. There was just no time for the first woman who broke his heart.
It was nice to have distractions from his thoughts. Gio’s best friends had his back. He knew pretty much everybody in his Indianapolis neighborhood. And the guy who moved across the street, a fellow b-baller named David, was becoming a good friend.
A very good friend.
David was bisexual, too.
But just as their relationship was beginning, the unthinkable happened: Gio’s birth mother reached out, emailed him, wanted to meet with him. And he was torn. She said she had “reasons” for abandoning him all those years ago, and her truth was not what he’d imagined.
There are a lot of pleasant surprises inside Things We Couldn’t Say. From the start, author Jay Coles gives his main character a great support system, and that’s a uniquely good thing. Gio enjoys the company of people who want the best for him, and it’s refreshing that even the ones who are villains do heroic things.
Everyone in this book, in fact, has heart, and that softens the drama that Coles adds — which leads to another nice surprise: There’s no overload of screeching drama here. Overwrought teen conflict is all but absent; even potential angsts that Gio might notice in his urban neighborhood are mentioned but not belabored.
This helps keep readers focused on a fine, relatable and very realistic coming-of-age story line.
This book is aimed at readers ages 12-and-up, but beware that there are a few gently explicit, but responsibly written, pages that might not be appropriate for kids in the lower target range. For older kids and adults, though, Things We
Couldn’t Say offers plenty of reasons to love it.
