Let's Talk Books

A fun, flirty, fake-dating romcom, packed with communication and overflowing with reasoned decision-making, Zarah Detand’s Operation Boyfriend is the perfect holiday romance read for those who detest an incompetent lead.

Cardiothoracic surgeon Dean Hollis is intense. Devoted to his work, intimidatingly competent, unfairly good-looking, and scarily composed, Dean is the kind of attending residents worship and fear in equal measure. To quell his mother’s fretting Dean tells her he has a boyfriend, only now she’s expecting said boyfriend to accompany him to his sister’s all-expenses-paid luxury resort destination wedding. Enter Dr Taylan Carter, the hottest resident Dean has ever supervised, and his opposite in many ways: bubbly, friendly, quick to smile, and devoid of the walls which leave Dean at such remove. Dean needs a date, Tay needs a holiday, they’re both dealing with an attraction neither would ever have spoken aloud, and they’re… communicating effectively? That’s doctors for you.

Detand offers the rarest of things in contemporary romance: communicative leads. Tay and Dean speak to each other throughout Operation Boyfriend, a story which relies on reality for its tension and not miscommunication, and those conversations build towards a relationship which feels grounded and full. Whilst the chemistry here is hardly off the charts, the bond between Tay and Dean feels likely and believable. Detand’s commitment to building a fleshed out and actively pursued relationship is refreshing in a genre that seems increasingly tropified and reliant on familiar patterns of making and breaking.

This loses some points with me on two counts, one is that in places the meaning of sentences was hard to parse. I come across this issue increasingly in trad-published works, and I can never tell if its the accidental blending of two sentences, or a missing comma, but in several places I had to pause and re-read something, and on more than once occasion I decided to just move on even if it wasn’t clear. In a similar vein, Detand sometimes has characters react to a ‘joke’ but the meaning, to me, was unclear and the humour didn’t land. The other area I think was a bit of struggle in this book is intimate scenes. Whilst technically open-door, much of the intimacy here seemed to be at once too detailed, and not detailed enough, taking a middle of the road stance that wasn’t especially satisfying to read, and was lexically repetitive regardless of the POV. I don’t think sex makes or breaks a romance novel, but I do think that lightly described scenes can be difficult. Casey McQuiston does light-description very well in Red, White and Royal Blue, whilst I think K.C. Carmichael has a similar awkwardness in her scenes in The Call-Up. This is definitely a personal preference, I am sure there will be readers who really enjoy the way Detand handles sex, shifting between precise detail and broad sensation, but it wasn’t for me.

I thoroughly enjoyed the wider cast of this novel, and the medical subplots peppered through. This grounded the characters in their realties, and helped to establish both the importance of their work, and the stresses they would encounter because of it, which I think was very necessary to the plot. I think Detand handled friendship and family relationships really well, giving us a sense of people, more than characters, and inviting is into thoroughly realised inter-personal dynamics. Humour is also a huge part of Operation Boyfriend and whilst it didn’t always land perfectly, Detand was very consistent: by the end I felt I understood each character’s sense of humour .

Ultimately this was a very fun, satisfying read, perfect for a holiday! 3.5 stars.