Review: The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

Have you ever joked about a work spouse? You know, the person you spend so much time with at work that you jokingly say you see them more often than your actual spouse? So many people have a work wife or work husband but how many have a work nemesis? In Sally Thorne's cute, new rom-com novel, The Hating Game, the two main characters are work rivals, opposites, office-sharing nemeses who must compete for the same job. This is either the recipe for love or for a terrible mess.

Lucy and Joshua are both executive assistants. Their respective publishing companies have merged and the two of them are sharing an office while the co-CEOs try to figure out how to merge two such different corporate cultures. That Lucy and Joshua hate each other makes the office tense. That they both want the newly announced position, which would be a huge promotion and would make one of them the other's boss, makes things more than tense. They play petty games with each other, make sniping comments, report each other to HR for policy infractions, adjust their work hours to try and outstay each other, and generally try to discomfit the other. They seem to be complete opposites in terms of personality as well. Lucy is quirky, bubbly, and endearing and she craves everyone's approval. She grew up on a strawberry farm and collects Smurfs. Joshua is reserved and aloof; he's corporate-minded and doesn't care if people like him. They really are like chalk and cheese. Until they aren't anymore. They've always been hyper-attentive to each other (she notices his shirt color rotation; he notices when she smiles) but strangely, it takes the competition for the promotion to make them more aware of each other as good people rather than the enemy. Once they start to fall for each other, opening themselves up and making themselves vulnerable to each other, the question is whether this contested promotion will keep them from the relationship it is clear they should have or if they can get past it to be together.

The novel is light and fluffy although it does briefly touch on the idea of chasing your dream and the importance of having supportive people and family behind you. Lucy and Joshua end up being likable characters although they start off as annoying and childish as middle schoolers. The novel is told entirely from Lucy's perspective and she can come across as immature and silly at times, especially when she's busy disliking Joshua. The first person narration makes it a little strange that she mentions several times how tiny she is with comments about her diminutive paws and the like. The romance dominates the plot with the work drama being much more secondary and although this isn't quite a fully fledged romance novel, the eventual sex scenes are fairly detailed so non-romance readers should be warned about that. Over all, it is a quick and cute, if rather predictable, beachy kind of read.

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Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.