The Hating Game: A Novel

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There isn’t much that everyone hasn’t already said about this book so I will go straight into why I loved the book.

I liked the characters well enough and really felt for them during some scenes, but I just never 100% committed to them. It also showed there is more to him than it appeared and once his story was revealed, I loved him even more. Lucy can’t let Joshua beat her at anything—especially when a huge new promotion goes up for the taking.

I couldn’t put it down until Lucy and Josh’s all-consuming hateship changed into a tentative friendship and then a juicy, tender, adorable love. The two are competitive and polar opposites to each other resulting in antagonising office relations. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He’s broody and a bit of a jackass, but he’s also really thoughtful and sweet and kind and vulnerable.

Delighted by the ins and outs of the publishing world, delighted with the dialogue between them, delighted by the wit that Lucy demonstrates in her inner monologues. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, he’s also rich, for an injection of glamour and hopefully some expensive parting gifts for our heroine once she figures out she needs to dump the asshole. This story is quite conventionally a romance with its use of well-known tropes – enemies-to-lovers, bring-a-fake-date-to-a-wedding and office-romance.The two major plot-twists towards the end were completely predictable for me but the story and the characters were enjoyable and engaging notwithstanding. The tension between the two is built up beautifully and the humour and pathos of this book is close to no other novels that I have read not only this year but last year too. I doubt Joshua’s friends would encourage him to be with Lucy because she wasn’t so great to him either. I’m pretty sure we’ve realized how that sets girls up for complicated relationships with attraction at best and abusive and violent relationships at worst.