REVIEW: When Joss Met Matt by Ellie Cahill

JaneC+ ReviewsContemporary romance / friends-to-lovers3 Comments

Dear Ms. Cahill:

“Sorbet sex” is the cleanser that Joss and Matt use to get over their bad breakups. Their habit started in college and continues for seven years up until the point that Matt calls Joss and says he needs to see her. That’s their semi-secret code for let’s get busy.

But why he needs her is the question that drives the book. The readers of this story all know that Matt and Joss will end up together. It’s a romance after all so the suspense is in how they get there.

Joss is our narrator and the book spends most of it’s time in the past, exploring the different breakups that lead to the sorbet sex. It didn’t feel like a romance much of the time but more like a chick lit book where we watch our intrepid heroine make one bad dating decision after another.

She has a long term boyfriend that becomes too possessive or she has a short term hookup that ends in cheating. We see Matt’s relationships through Joss’ eyes as well. Matt is not the stereotypical hero. He’s five feet ten. A nice looking guy with a nice attitude. (In fact, Joss declares him too nice for her to date to one of her friends). His flaw is his tendency to date women who are very pretty but have deep character flaws. He almost doesn’t care, though. He dates them for their looks most of the time.

Each character has a serious relationship but lucky for Joss and Matt (because they have to end up together), something always goes wrong. I thought that the relationship failures were well done, placing both Matt and Joss as the villains and the victims. In some cases, Joss and Matt were the perpetrators of their own relationship demises and sometimes they choose well and the other person didn’t love them back as much as they wanted.

There was one moment of discomfort. Joss meets a guy and after a good date, she goes home to have sex with him. The guy is really turning her on when he requests, through a small series of suggestions, that she punch him in the nuts. Joss is horrified and leaves. But it doesn’t stop there. She tells her friends about it and they make fun of him. Only Matt says that he respects the guy for being brave enough to ask for what he wants. I disliked that Joss made fun of a person for a sexual fetish and the way that she treated the date was in poor taste. It was written for laughs but actually left a sour taste in my mouth and made me think less of Joss.

The question I had for myself as I read the book was whether I saw enough of Joss and Matt together to believe in them as a couple and I don’t know if I did. I almost always saw them in the context of serving as the “sorbet” for the other person’s break up. I knew that they were meant to be together because that was the premise of the book. Joss, I felt, was the main impediment to Matt and Joss not being together. She regularly said that Matt was too nice and that she couldn’t date him. But it never rang true to me that she could have great sex with him (some of the best) and that she would laugh with him, remain friends with him for over seven years, and not realize she loved him.

I get that some of her hesitation stemmed from fear of losing Matt as a friend but early on, when he semi approached dating, why blow him off then. (Of course she had to or the book would have been over in the fourth chapter or so). I wondered if we had spent more time in the present (I’d say 75% of the book is flashbacks) whether I would have felt more connected to Matt and Joss’ romance. In many ways, I did feel like they were best friends who decided that they needed each other more than they needed others. And that’s a different kind of romance, not a bad kind, just different.

I never got bored reading the story (and I read it in print!) so despite my reservations, I still enjoyed it and would definitely seek out another book by this author. C+

Best regards,

Jane

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Jane

Jane Litte is the founder of Dear Author, a lawyer, and a lover of pencil skirts. She self publishes NA and contemporaries (and publishes with Berkley and Montlake) and spends her downtime reading romances and writing about them. Her TBR pile is much larger than the one shown in the picture and not as pretty. You can reach Jane by email at jane @ dearauthor dot com

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