Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating

What's inside (8 sections)

1. College disasters and a reunion nobody planned
2. Hazel up close, without the filter
3. Josh, the steady one with his own cracks
4. The double date scheme
5. When just friends stops working
6. What holds up, what wears thin, and who should pick it up
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

A friend pressed this one on me after I complained that a lot of rom coms feel the same. She said this was the one with the chaotic teacher and the calm guy who actually likes her chaos. It came out in 2018 from Gallery Books, 320 pages in paperback tied to ISBN 9781501165856. I went in expecting something light to read between heavier books. I stayed up too late two nights in a row.

If you want the short version before we get into it: Hazel Camille Bradford is a lot, by her own admission, and most men bail fast. Josh Im has known her since college and always filed her under entertaining but not for him. Ten years later they collide again in Portland, Oregon through his sister, and they decide to set each other up on blind dates. The dates fail. The friendship works too well. They keep insisting they are not dating each other, even as everyone around them stops believing it.

This is a standalone romance. No cliffhanger, no series homework. Spice is open door and pretty frank in places. Tone stays warm and funny even when it gets insecure underneath.

College disasters and a reunion nobody planned

Hazel meets Josh in college in the worst way possible. She throws up on his shoes the first night they cross paths. That story follows her for years, and honestly it sets the pattern. Later, while groggy after surgery, she sends him a rambling email that makes no sense. He remembers her as a spectacle more than a peer. She remembers him as the cute, together guy who witnessed her at her least composed.

They lose touch the way college acquaintances do. Life moves. Hazel trains to teach and bounces through short relationships that start fun and end when the guy decides she is too much. Josh settles into work as a physical therapist, keeps a tidy apartment, dates seriously, tries to do things right. For a while they live in different orbits.

The bridge back is Emily. Emily is Josh's younger sister and, by the time the main story starts, Hazel's close friend. Emily marries Dave, who happens to be a principal, and Hazel lands a new job teaching third grade at his school. So Hazel suddenly sees a lot of Emily and Dave, and that means she sees a lot of Josh at family dinners and group hangs.

The timing matters. Josh just ended a two year relationship after being cheated on. He is not looking for anything fast. He is tired and a little flat. Hazel barrels back into his life right then, loud and full of plans, and going out with her feels like air after a stuffy room. Not romance at first. Just relief. Someone who makes an ordinary Tuesday dinner funny.

I found this setup easy to buy. Reconnecting through a sibling's circle happens all the time. The book does not force a meet cute. It lets an old embarrassing history turn into a private joke, which is how a lot of real friendships start. You were there when I was a mess, so I can relax around you now.

Hazel up close, without the filter

Hazel is the kind of character people either adore on page one or need fifty pages to warm to. I adored her fast, though I get why some readers need time. She talks before she thinks. She loves hard. She keeps pets, she loves absurd humor, she decorates and dresses the way she wants, and she says the wrong thing in delicate moments without meaning harm.

At school she is different in a way I appreciated. With third graders she is patient and prepared. She plans lessons, she notices the quiet kid, she stays late to fix a bulletin board. The chaos is mostly social, not professional. That split felt true to teachers I have known. You can be the person who cries laughing at lunch and still run a tight classroom.

Her dating history has taught her a hard lesson. Men often like her spark at first, then ask her to turn it down. Be a little quieter. Dress a little plainer. Stop with the jokes. She has tried to shrink before and it never holds. By the time she reconnects with Josh, she has decided she will not audition for likability anymore. If a guy needs her to be smaller, he can leave.

What I liked here is that the book lets Hazel be insecure without making her a project. She worries she comes on too loud or too needy when she gets excited. But she keeps showing up anyway. She apologizes when she actually messes up, not for her personality as a whole. That line is drawn pretty cleanly, and it keeps her sympathetic when she steamrolls a conversation.

One small thing that rang true: her apartment is a mess in the way of someone who is always hosting or cooking or helping a friend move. Josh's place looks like a catalog. The contrast is not played as gross versus clean. It is played as lived in versus controlled. I live somewhere in the middle, and both spaces felt familiar.

If Hazel wears on you, it will probably be in the middle stretch where she talks in circles around her feelings. She can name everyone else's problem and miss her own. That frustrated me once or twice. Then I remembered people do exactly that at her age, especially when admitting the truth would risk a friendship they rely on.

Josh, the steady one with his own cracks

Josh Im is mellow and polite, careful in how he moves through a room. He is the guy who remembers your coffee order and texts to confirm plans. As a physical therapist he spends his days coaching people through slow progress, and that patience shows in how he treats Hazel. He does not flinch when she is loud. He laughs, redirects, carries on.

The book gives him more weight than the standard nice guy role. He is the son of South Korean immigrants, and that background shapes his sense of duty and his closeness with his family. He wants to be reliable. He wants his parents to be proud without making a show of it. He takes relationships seriously, which is why the cheating breakup guts him. He did everything right and still got blindsided.

His sister Emily matters a lot to him. She is married and settled, and she teases without mercy. Their family dinners give the story a spine. You see Josh as a brother and son in those scenes. He shows up, he helps cook, he takes ribbing about his love life. Those scenes slowed the pace in a good way for me. They made Portland feel like home rather than a backdrop.

Work details stay light. You get enough to understand his days, patients with sore knees and stiff shoulders, charts and small wins, without a medical lecture. I was glad for that restraint. The point is his temperament. He listens for a living, so he listens to Hazel better than her exes did.

He has blind spots too. He can be passive. He avoids hard talks until avoidance stops working. Early on he tells himself Hazel is not his type, which is partly true and partly a shield. If she is not his type, he does not have to risk wanting her. That self protection makes sense after betrayal, but it also keeps him stuck. Watching him notice that pattern, slowly, was one of the better threads for me.

Physically he is described as handsome in an easy way, though the book spends less time on that than on how safe Hazel feels with him. Safe here does not mean boring. It means she can be fully herself and he stays. For a character who has been asked to shrink so often, that steadiness lands hard.

The double date scheme

The central device is simple. Hazel decides Josh needs to get back out there. Josh thinks Hazel should meet someone who appreciates her. So they set each other up. Double blind dates, grouped outings, low pressure. They will wingman for each other. Nothing between them, of course. Just friends helping friends.

On paper this sounds like a sitcom pilot. On the page it works because the dates keep failing in ways that reveal Hazel and Josh instead of just filling pages. One setup has no spark at all. Another turns uncomfortable and they have to rescue each other. The humor comes from commentary in the car after, the debrief texts, the shared look across a table that says can we leave. Anyone who has endured a bad setup will recognize that aftermath glow, when the date is bad but the debrief with your friend is great.

Portland helps. Bars with trivia, casual restaurants, group birthday drinks, a hike that seemed like a good idea. The city is present without a travel guide feel. Rain, coffee, neighborhoods that feel lived in. I have never lived there and still felt oriented.

Emily and Dave get a lot of page time during this stretch, and I was grateful. Emily knows both sides and calls out nonsense early. Dave as Hazel's boss could have been awkward, but the book keeps work and personal life mostly separate. A staff meeting scene or a hallway chat reminds you Hazel is new and wants to prove herself, then the story moves back to her personal life. That balance kept the stakes realistic. She needs this job to go well. She also needs a life outside it.

The scheme also lets the authors show why Josh and Hazel click without declaring it. She pulls him into karaoke or a weird food truck he would never try alone. He talks her down when she spirals about a parent email or a lesson that flopped. They start texting all day. Inside jokes pile up. Friends start assuming they are together and they correct people a little too fast.

Here is where I laughed the most. Hazel narrates some of these outings with total confidence beforehand, then total revision after. This will be perfect, she thinks. Then it is not perfect at all. The comedy is situational more than one liners, though there are plenty of those. It reminded me of going out with my own close friends, where the plan falls apart and the night is still great because of who you are with.

A fair note: if you dislike dating plot engines, this middle may test you. The pattern repeats. New setup, hopeful start, collapse, debrief. I did not mind because each failure shifts their friendship a notch. But readers who want constant forward motion might skim one of the later setups. I skimmed a little myself around the two thirds mark, then got pulled back by a quiet scene at Josh's place that had nothing to do with dating.

When just friends stops working

Friendship turning physical is handled with care here. It does not happen because of a grand gesture. It happens because they already act like a couple in every way except the one they keep avoiding. They cook together. They fall asleep on the couch. They know each other's family stories. At some point the line blurs, and they cross it, and then they try to pretend crossing it changed nothing.

The book is honest about how confusing that stage is. Hazel wants to be chill about it. Josh wants to be honorable about it. Neither quite manages. They keep saying they are not dating, even as they get jealous of each other's setups and cancel dates to hang out together instead. That denial could feel dumb in lesser hands. Here it felt human. Naming it would mean risking the best friendship either has right now.

Intimacy scenes are explicit and warm, with a lot of attention to consent and humor. They talk during sex, they laugh, they pause when something is awkward. Hazel's lack of filter does not vanish in bed, which makes those scenes funnier and more tender than the usual polished version. Josh is attentive in a way that fits his job and his personality. He checks in. He remembers what she likes. It never reads as clinical. It reads as two people who already trust each other figuring out a new layer.

The emotional fallout matters more than the logistics. Hazel starts to wonder if she is asking for too much again. Josh wonders if he is moving too fast after heartbreak. Both pull back a little, then miss each other, then overcorrect. I recognized that dance. You tell yourself you are fine with casual because casual feels safer than admitting you want more and hearing no.

Family adds pressure without becoming melodrama. Emily sees what is happening before they do, which creates funny and tense scenes where she tries not to meddle and meddles anyway. Their parents, especially on Josh's side, model long commitment, which makes Josh think harder about what he wants. Hazel's own family history gets less page time, but enough to explain why being chosen as is matters so much to her.

I should say the conflict stays low angst by design. No secret baby, no villain ex returning with a scheme, no big lie that lasts for a hundred pages. The cheating ex is backstory, not a triangle. The tension comes from two adults getting in their own way. Some readers will love that softness. Readers who want high drama may find the last third too smooth. I landed in the middle. I wanted one harder conversation earlier, but I liked that the big talk, when it came, felt earned rather than staged.

What holds up, what wears thin, and who should pick it up

What holds up best is the friendship. The authors write banter that sounds spoken rather than written. Texts with typos and bad timing. Teasing that never tips into mean. Hazel says something wild, Josh answers dry, both crack up. That rhythm carries the whole book. Even when I guessed where a chapter was headed, I wanted to stay for the dialogue.

Hazel's growth also holds. She does not sand off her edges to win Josh. She learns to trust that he means it when he says he likes her edges. There is a late stretch where old shame flares, tied to feeling like too much in front of people whose opinion matters. She handles it better than she would have in college. Not perfectly. Better. That felt like actual progress rather than a personality transplant.

Josh's arc is quieter but real. He starts as the guy who does everything correctly and gets hurt anyway. He ends as someone willing to choose, out loud, even if choosing carries risk. The shift shows in small actions. He stops hedging about plans. He tells Emily to back off with love. He tells Hazel plainly what he wants. For a reserved character, those plain statements carry force.

What wears thin for me, a little, is the middle repetition I mentioned. The date setups blur together. A couple of side characters on those dates stay thin, which is fine because they are not the point, but it means some chapters lean entirely on Hazel and Josh to entertain. They usually do. Still, tighter would have helped.

I also wanted a touch more of Hazel's teaching life late in the book. Early chapters use the classroom well to show her competence. Later, work fades while romance takes over. Given that the new job is a big reason she is in Josh's orbit, one more school scene near the end would have grounded her win. She gets a personal happy ending that satisfies. I just wanted a professional beat to match.

Content notes worth knowing: open door sex with humor and clear consent, mild language, drinking on dates, cheating in backstory rather than on page, brief medical talk around physical therapy and a past surgery, family pressure handled warmly. No violence. Portland rain gets plenty of page time if weather counts as content.

Who should pick it up: readers who like friends to lovers without cruel miscommunication, opposites attract where the calm partner genuinely enjoys the chaos, found family dinners, and funny dating disasters. Readers who need high stakes or slow burn angst might find it too cozy. Readers who bounced off New Girl style heroines might struggle with Hazel at first, though I think teaching scenes soften her fast.

I closed it smiling, which sounds simple and is not. A lot of rom coms make me smile during and fade fast. This one stuck because of a small moment near the end, Hazel laughing at herself instead of apologizing for herself, Josh laughing with her instead of smoothing it over. That distinction, with versus at, is the whole book. He is with her. After so many men who asked her to be less, that with felt like enough to build on.

FAQ

When was Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating published?

Gallery Books published it on September 4, 2018. The paperback runs 320 pages and the ISBN is 9781501165856.

Who are the main characters?

Hazel Camille Bradford, a third grade teacher, and Josh Im, a physical therapist. They reconnect in Portland through his sister Emily.

Is it part of a series?

No. It is a standalone romance with no cliffhanger, separate from the Beautiful Bastard books and other Christina Lauren series.