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The Hating Game is the enemies-to-lovers workplace romance that set the modern bar: Lucy and Joshua are executive assistants who claim to despise each other, and the slow detonation of all that pent-up loathing into something else entirely is as fun and swoony as the genre gets.
The Review
Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman sit across from each other every day, assistants to the two co-CEOs of a publishing house forced together by a merger, and they have turned mutual hatred into an art form. They play staring games, count each other's smiles, and sabotage one another with passive-aggressive precision. Then a promotion they both want puts the rivalry into overdrive, and the line between hate and something far more dangerous starts to blur. Sally Thorne takes the oldest setup in romance and makes it feel brand new through sheer force of voice.
That voice is the book's secret weapon. Lucy narrates with such bright, anxious, funny energy that you're inside her crush before she'll admit she has one, and Thorne nails the specific delicious agony of noticing everything about a person you've sworn to despise, the color of his shirts, the rare real smile, the exact distance between two desks. The banter is genuinely sharp, the tension is wound tight, and the slow burn pays off in scenes that have launched a thousand imitators. It's grumpy-sunshine, forced-proximity, only-one-bed catnip executed with real craft.
What lifts it above pure froth is that both leads have interior lives. Joshua, in particular, turns out to be far more than the buttoned-up nemesis he appears, and the reveal of what's underneath his cold front is the kind of swoon that readers still cite years later. Lucy's own insecurities, about her job, her worth, her tendency to perform niceness, give the comedy a soft emotional center. You're laughing, then you're genuinely rooting for them.
The honest caveat: this is a contained, low-stakes romance that lives almost entirely in the will-they-won't-they, so readers wanting a big external plot or a sprawling cast won't find it here. It's also steamier than its cute premise suggests, with explicit scenes, so it's firmly adult rom-com rather than sweet. And if enemies-to-lovers isn't your trope, the early antagonism may read as more prickly than charming.
It's also worth noting how much of the book's lasting influence comes down to pacing. Thorne understands that the pleasure of a slow burn lives in delay, in the near-misses and the charged silences and the moments where one character almost says the thing and then doesn't, and she draws those out with real discipline before finally letting the dam break. So many enemies-to-lovers books that followed are essentially chasing the specific high this one delivers. There's a reason it became a touchstone, was adapted into a film, and still tops recommendation lists years after its debut: it does the fundamentals exceptionally well and trusts its central pair enough to let the tension do the heavy lifting. For everyone else, it's a near-perfect comfort read, the book people hand you when you say you want to fall in love with falling in love. Come for the office warfare and the banter; stay for one of the most satisfying slow-burn payoffs the genre has to offer.
Reviewed by Sloane
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