The Hating Game – Book Review

Nemesis (n.)

1) An opponent or rival whom a person cannot best or overcome;
2) A person’s undoing;
3) Joshua Templeman.

Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman hate each other. Not dislike. Not begrudgingly tolerate. Hate. And they have no problem displaying their feelings through a series of ritualistic passive aggressive maneuvers as they sit across from each other, executive assistants to co-CEOs of a publishing company. Lucy can’t understand Joshua’s joyless, uptight, meticulous approach to his job. Joshua is clearly baffled by Lucy’s overly bright clothes, quirkiness, and Pollyanna attitude.

Now up for the same promotion, their battle of wills has come to a head and Lucy refuses to back down when their latest game could cost her her dream job…But the tension between Lucy and Joshua has also reached its boiling point, and Lucy is discovering that maybe she doesn’t hate Joshua. And maybe, he doesn’t hate her either. Or maybe this is just another game.

For some people, this might be the most unpopular blog post as I have nothing but OK experience with this book.

After reading too many raving reviews about this book, I found myself wanting to read this book. And when I finally got my hands on this book, I was super duper excited that I started to read the book.

But as I was reading, I don’t understand, why there’s so much hype about this book. It’s not because I am not an ardent fan of romance novels but this book unfortunately was not for me.

Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeton are sworn enemies working alongside each other at a publishing company. When they were up for promotion, they started working against each other but fate has other ways to make them unite together and…fall in love.

There’s a movie based on this book and I seriously thought I was watching some chick lit movie. I didn’t really like the main protagonist Lucy much but I didn’t fancy the other characters either. There’s one whole chapter of a sex scene which I briefly skimmed but overall, I thought this was just an OK book. The plot in my opinion was good and the ending was great at how Lucy stood up against Josh’s father which helped me to increase the rating of this book. The writing was OK and I supposed in my opinion, this was an OK romance book–worth three stars.