Charmed and Dangerous by Shelley Page is a teen rom-com that I’ll admit I picked up mostly because I was instantly charmed by the cover. My library got a copy of it, and after DNFing a couple of books and slogging through a third, I really needed something light that I knew would be fun and easy to read. And this book covered all those bases!
Charmed and Dangerous follows Monroe Bennett in small-town Illinois, where she works at the Bureau of Mystical Affairs, when a love charm gets loose at her high school and she and her fellow junior agents get assigned to track down the source. Her boss’s daughter Iris James gets charmed, and Iris’s mother (the aforementioned boss) tasks Monroe with protecting her during the investigation, while at the same time, Iris asks Monroe to fake-date her to make her ex jealous so they’ll get back together before prom.
This should be easy to pull off. Monroe doesn’t believe in love after her parents’ recent divorce, and Iris obviously doesn’t actually want to date her, because the whole point of them fake dating is so her ex will get back with her. But as they spend more time together, watching rom-coms and investigating the loose love charm, real feelings start to emerge.
I thought this was a very cute YA romance! It’s not super serious, but there’s still depth in the ways it talks about love and how you know if you’re meant to be with someone. The love charm isn’t one that instantly makes your crush fall for you, and will only succeed in driving away anyone that isn’t right, which I liked because it isn’t super creepy but still brings up the question of whether or not love charms are moral.
The relationship between Monroe and Iris was well done, with Monroe as somebody who thinks true love is a sham after her parents split up, and Iris as a huge fan of all things romance, but as they spend more time with each other on “fake” dates and investigating suspects who might be the charm dealer, Monroe begins to wonder if maybe she does like Iris as more than a friend after all.
If you’re a fan of witchy stories and teen drama that only gets more heated with the addition of magic, try this book out! I enjoyed it, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a cute queer story about what love can be and what makes people want it.
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