Review : When Joss Met Matt by Ellie Cahill

Summary (from Goodreads)
 
Title : When Joss Met Matt
Author : Ellie Cahill
Publication Date : February 24th 2015
Publisher : Ballantine Books
Goodreads - Amazon - Barnes & Noble

Ellie Cahill is poised to coin the term “sorbet sex” with her charming twist on the age-old ‘friends-with-benefits’ story.

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.

Personal Thoughts

Bravo Ellie Cahill a.k.a Liz Czukas! Finally! Finally, we have a New Adult book that actually portrays a realistic approach at romance in college life. Add to that strong characterizations and a sweet romance, we have a winner with When Joss Met Matt.

If there is one thing that Ellie Cahill excels at, it's most definitely characterizations. She is the bomb at writing realistic characters that you feel like you really get to know over the course of the book. Not only that, but she also writes diverse characters, everyone with different personalities, making it so effortless to get lost in the lives of these characters. With both Joss and Matt in When Joss Met Matt, Ellie Cahill has once again created characters that were realistically flawed and easy to connect with. Because the book is told over various years, we get to really see these two characters grow and flourish, learning from their past mistakes. Joss, especially, was prone to making many mistakes, but who doesn't make bad choices in college. I really liked that the author made Joss have her blemishes, but her character was also not frustrating. Being in college myself, I understood why Joss made some of the poor choices that she did. And then there was Matt, swoony, a smooth-talker and entirely loveable. He, too, wasn't perfect by any means, but I still wound up loving his characters because of how genuinely sweet he was. I definitely have a thing for good boys if you can't already tell. The secondary characters were also very well developed. I especially enjoyed Nellie, Joss' best friend. Her close friendship with Joss was so well-written!

Now you probably want to know why I was singing so many praises for Ellie Cahill in that first paragraph. See, in When Joss Met Matt, when Joss and Matt meet, they hit it off as friends and then they date a LOT of people while they are in college. I'm not going to lie, it irritates me how so many characters in NA meet the love of their life from the get go. Sure that can happen in some rare cases, but people in college date a lot and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. College is that time to be experimenting and growing up, so it makes sense that you would go out with many different people. That's why I was so pleased that Ellie Cahill decided to incorporate this into When Joss Met Matt. And then there is the actual relationship between Joss and Matt. These two were undoubtedly adorable together, but it was clear that when they first met, they were not emotionally mature enough to be a good couple. The friendship they shared was so well-written. I loved the banter between the two of them. With their friends-with-benefits (or sorbet sex as is referred to by the characters) relationship, Ellie Cahill could have made this relationship quite messy and awkward, but it never did become that. Even though both Matt and Joss have a lot of sex, the scenes were never explicit or distasteful. In fact, a lot of them were fade-to-black, which I did not mind. Theirs was definitely slow-burn romance and I loved it. It gave me lots of feels and when they finally did get together, my heart sang in joy!

Liz Czukas' NA debut as Ellie Cahill was an absolute delight. I'm really excited to see what she brings into the genre! With fun banter, delightful characters and a sweet slow-burn romance that will leave you feeling all happy, When Joss Met Matt was a champion! I highly recommend this to readers who are sick of the "troubled pasts" trope so common in NA!

Rating 

Cover : 4/5
Plot : 4/5
Characters : 4/5
Writing : 4/5

Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for the e-ARC of When Joss Met Matt.