Review of When Joss Met Matt by Ellie Cahill

Title/Author:
Publisher/Date published:
How I got this book:
Buy this book at: The Book Depository

Goodreads summary: Dating can be fun, but it can leave a nasty taste in your mouth. For Joss, ever since her longtime boyfriend cheated on her, she doesn’t want her last memory of a guy to be that jerk. Enter her college friend, Matt. They come up with a theory: after a bad break-up, a person needs to cleanse the palate with a little sorbet sex. Lovers for a night, but always back to being friends in the morning. The two can handle it because they have a contract: rules they wrote, rules they follow and rules they can sometimes bend. The arrangement works: everyone needs a little sorbet now and again... until it starts to be the only thing you want. And then Joss breaks the one rule they never wrote down: don’t fall in love.

So I was ready to LOVE When Joss Met Matt, cause my friend Debby keeps raving about it. But I'm sad to say that I was not nearly as enthusiastic about it as she was (please don't kill me Debby)...

I love a good fluffly contemporary, and New Adult explores a period in someone's life that we don't really get to see much of: college. I LOVE stories set in college, cause it's all about discovering who you are on your own, without the constant presence of your parents and parties and dorms and just YES. But I felt that When Joss Met Matt wasn't so much a fluffy contemporary as it was a sequence of random hook-ups.

It might be due to the fact that I never really cared much for Joss. I did like Matt, but Joss was just a bit too crass and I didn't really get her reasoning behind a lot of things and there was just basically nothing I liked about her except that she liked animals. Or says she likes animals. Cause she was just not a good cat mom. I mean, seriously, she's constantly annoyed by her cat and shoving him out of the way and DUH, cats respond negatively to that. I might be a little oversensitive about this cause I have a cute kitty myself, but it really bothered me that she was constantly talking about *having* to pet her cat cause he wouldn't stop *bothering* her until she did and I was like, yeah, you just got home, of course the kitty wants some attention.
Anyway.

I did like Matt, he seemed like a decent human being and just such a guy, I could understand Joss falling for him in the end. But he was being a bit of a douche at the end, I know he was hurt, but still. I guess that I just didn't like that they kept going back for each other for SEVEN years to have sorbet sex, with the best reason for them not being together being that Joss thinks Matt is too nice? I mean, what? I'm not saying that just not having those kinds of feelings for someone isn't a legitimate reason to be together, but she obviously thinks he's attractive enough to have sex with him and he's one of her best friends. I could have gotten behind this if they'd just been friends without the physical contact, but this just felt off.

The back and forth between the present and their whole history of hook-ups also didn't really work for me, it just felt like one long line of bad relationships interspaced with sex with each other. I never got the fuzzies about them together, I didn't FEEL that they were falling for each other, or at least not from Joss' side of things, which was the POV. I also didn't like that aside from this, we never really got to see much of their lives. I mean, how are they doing in college and hanging out with friends aside from as props for their relationships. There was nothing about either of them just being a person and I would have liked that.

I'm very disappointed to say that I just wasn't into When Joss Met Matt, even though I wanted to love it REALLY badly, I just did not like this and didn't get my fluffy on as I wanted to.

My rating: 1,5 stars