Playing with Matches

Named a Best Book of Summer by Refinery29, Bustle, and PopSugar "The best rom-com of the season...overflowing with charm and heart." --Bustle "The perfect Summer read--smart, funny, escapist, and bursting with charm." --PopSugar In the tradition of Good in Bed and The Assistants comes a funny and smart comedy about a young matchmaker balancing her messy personal life and the demands of her eccentric clients. Sasha Goldberg has a lot going for her: a recent journalism degree from NYU, an apartment with her best friend Caroline, and a relationship that would be amazing if her finance-bro boyfriend Jonathan would ever look up from his BlackBerry. But when her dream career falls through, she uses her family's darkest secret to land a job as a matchmaker for New York City's elite at the dating service Bliss. Despite her inexperience, Sasha throws herself into her new career, trolling for catches on Tinder, coaching her clients through rejection, and dishing out dating advice to people twice her age. She sets up a TV exec who wanted kids five years ago, a forty-year-old baseball-loving virgin, and a consultant with a rigorous five-page checklist for her ideal match. Sasha hopes to find her clients The One, like she did. But when Jonathan betrays her, she spirals out of control--and right into the arms of a writer with a charming Southern drawl, who she had previously set up with one of her clients. He's strictly off-limits, but with her relationship on the rocks, all bets are off. Fresh, sweet, and laugh-out-loud funny, Playing with Matches is the addictive story about dating in today's swipe-heavy society, and a young woman trying to find her own place in the world.

"Playing with Matches is pretty much a novel about what you think your life is like . . . . Hate to break it to you, but ghostwriting your best friend's text to her boyfriend does not qualify you as a relationship expert, and this novel will help you understand why." --Betches, "Love in the age of Tinder is confusing, weird, and often hilarious--at least it is when told by. . . Hannah Orenstein. . . . [A]n addicting story of love lost and found on the dating scene's latest frontier: the Internet." --Boston Magazine, "Addictive and zinging, this novel will have your Tinder matches languishing as you rush to the end." --Read It Forward, "An engaging tale . . . . you won't be ready to say goodbye." --DC Refined, "Funny, sexy, and absurdly entertaining." --MarieClaire.com

Hannah Orenstein is the author of Playing with Matches, Love at First Like, and Head Over Heels, and is the deputy editor of dating at Elite Daily. Previously, she was a writer and editor at Seventeen.com. She lives in Brooklyn.