Title: The Hating Game
Author: Sally Thorne
Publisher: William Morrow and Company
Publication date: 9 August 2016
Genres: Romance, Contemporary, Adult
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Nemesis (n.)
1) An opponent or rival whom a person cannot best or overcome.
2) A person’s undoing
3) Joshua Templeman
Lucy Hutton has always been certain that the nice girl can get the corner office. She’s charming and accommodating and prides herself on being loved by everyone at Bexley & Gamin. Everyone except for coldly efficient, impeccably attired, physically intimidating Joshua Templeman. And the feeling is mutual.
Trapped in a shared office together 40 (OK, 50 or 60) hours a week, they’ve become entrenched in an addictive, ridiculous never-ending game of one-upmanship. There’s the Staring Game. The Mirror Game. The HR Game. Lucy can’t let Joshua beat her at anything—especially when a huge new promotion goes up for the taking.
If Lucy wins this game, she’ll be Joshua’s boss. If she loses, she’ll resign. So why is she suddenly having steamy dreams about Joshua, and dressing for work like she’s got a hot date? After a perfectly innocent elevator ride ends with an earth-shattering kiss, Lucy starts to wonder whether she’s got Joshua Templeman all wrong.
Maybe Lucy Hutton doesn’t hate Joshua Templeman. And maybe, he doesn’t hate her either. Or maybe this is just another game.
Here’s the thing: I’m not a big fan of contemporary. Sometimes, I often find them lacking in suspense, plot twists and big climaxes. But after several months of having a lot of that happening in fantasy books, I felt like it was about time to settle down for just a bit and just finally pick up a contemporary that I think I might enjoy reading. I read The Hating Game during my 24 Hour Readathon, and I honestly do not regret it. Not only is this an easy read where you can finish it in about a day, but it has such a compelling plot and interesting characters. Let’s dive right into it!
Admittedly, the book did not have that big of a climax, but it did have an interesting bit of twist and little something more on top. Yes, this is an office-based sort of romance, but the thing that makes it interesting is that they don’t just work for some office–they work for two publishing companies that were forced to merge to keep themselves from bankruptcy. Our main characters, Josh and Lucy, are from opposing companies that needs to work together to keep their jobs and everyone else’s afloat. They’re sort of COO’s but not COO’s to the current CEO’s of the companies they work for. It was a pretty interesting concept and I love how the plot unfurled with the characters’ development.
All I want to do is kiss you until I fall asleep. I want to slide in between your sheets, and find out what goes on inside your head, and underneath your clothes. I want to make a fool of myself over you.
I love our main couple here. I personally adore Lucinda (Lucy) Hutton because she’s such a weirdo, but in an adorable and relatable way. She loves her job and adores publishing from the moment she went on that little field trip to a publishing company as a kid. Her love for books also fueled her drive to work for a publishing company too, which is just, you know, #goals. She’s five foot flat of smallness, is a smart and quick as a whip kind of woman and she’s headstrong. Although she’s too nice that she lets people step all over her, I’m glad to she overcame it towards the book. I absolutely love everything about her. She’s, as they say, small, but terrible. And the thing here is that, for once, unlike in fantasy books, Lucy’s parents are the honest to Merlin sweetest and are both, thankfully, alive. They’re super supportive of their daughter and that honestly gave me all the fluttering feels.
It’s not to say that I didn’t fall in love with Joshua (Josh) Templeman the way Lucy did. This man. Oh my sweet baby bejeezus, this man. What a guy. He comes off as this person that ‘s totally blunt and hard on everyone, but most especially, on himself–but that’s because of his messed up dad who pretty much ignored him for the majority of his entire life because him being “born” was not part of the “plan”. Like, screw you, Josh’s dad. Josh is a brilliant and intelligent man. Although his methods of choosing who to let go in the company during the merge was a little unorthodox to some, it has saved both companies in more ways than one. He’s tactical and also quite practical. He’s also a secret nice guy, which is, of course, my kind of man. In the fictional sense. But I don’t mind being in an enemies-to-lovers kind of trope with some Josh Templeman in real life.
I just love a slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers story and their dynamic immediately had me hooked. This is not your typical kind of enemies-to-lovers with one being a total pain in the bottom to the point of being unforgivable. I like that despite them being enemies, they have mutual respect for each other’s careers and what they can both offer to the table. It’s not like one is smarter or stronger than the other in terms of career. They’re both smart and strong. They’re equals in every sense of the word, and when they finally got that whole “I hate my co-worker who I dutifully respect because they do their job just as well as I” thing over, they slowly, just slowly start to get to know each other and peel off each other’s layers (figuratively and literally in the sense of clothes *wink wink*), and it unfurls that they don’t really have to be enemies. They could be friends. They could be so much more.
“What are you imagining? Your expression is filthy.”
“Strangling you. Bare hands.” I can barely get the words out. I’m huskier than a phone-sex operator after a double shift.
“So that’s your kink.” His eyes are going dark.
“Only where you’re concerned.”
Both his eyebrows ratchet up, and he opens his mouth as his eyes go completely black, but he does not seem to be able to say a word.
It is wonderful.
The one thing I love about their romance is that they’re the kind of couple that makes the other earn stronger wills than the ones they never realized they had. Remember how I said that Lucy had a tendency to let people step all over her because she’s the nice one that shoulders everyone else’s jobs when they don’t bring it in in time? Josh shut that stuff down and made her woman up to their other co-workers that kept making Lucy do all their work for them. That was such a satisfying moment for Lucy. In Josh’s case, he’s not very good with standing up to his father. At the end of the day, despite the rubbish way his dad treated him, he’s still doing everything he can to impress his father. But Lucy stood up for Josh when his father was being grade-A twat. This taught Josh to be proud of the accomplishments that he has with his career so far, and if that isn’t so empowering, I don’t know what is.
They compliment each other so well. And all these little “games” they have with each other, hence the whole “hating game” title into the mix is all very entertaining. You will laugh, and cry, and squeal from all the romance and comedy mixed up in this beautiful bundle of a book.
“I love him so much it’s like a thread piercing me. Punching holes. Dragging through. Stitching love into me. I’ll neve robe able to untangle myself from this feeling. The color of love is surely this robin’s-egg blue.”
I never realized I would enjoy a contemporary book this much. I’m not sure if it’s because it was finally time for me to start reading contemporaries or that Sally Thorne is just one heck of an amazing author. Both works for me, of course. I think it’s also because it’s not YA? I just sort of cringe whenever I try to read contemporary YA, so having to read contemporary Adult in such a setting makes a lot more sense and that I’m more comfortable reading within my age group. Also because I’m pretty much an adult now (ugh, the bane of my own existence), so being compelled to adult books is totally normal and I should try to read more of it.
What else can I say? This is definitely one of my favorite reads of 2019. Compelling, romantic, and sexy–an overall experience that will have you wanting more. I highly recommend it to all those hopeless romantics, to those that are trash for enemies-to-lovers trope or someone that just wants to escape the drag of certain fantasy books. You will not come to regret reading this, just as much as I did not regret it.
“The trick is to find that one person who can give it back as good as they can take it.”
Ugh, I am still not over The Hating Game. I’m so tempted to re-read it again because I feel like I didn’t devour the book enough the first time around due to the 24 Hour Readathon. But it’s a definite guarantee that this is one of those books that you’d want to reread a second time, a third time… or more times than remotely possible. But enough about my fangirling over this book. Let’s discuss!
- Have you read The Hating Game? If you have, did you like it? If you haven’t, are you planning on reading it soon?
- Who are some of your favorite enemies-to-lovers couples in books?
- What other books like this would you recommend?
Til’ the next post!
The Bookish Goddess 