Title: The Hating Game.
Author: Sally Thorne.
Serie: Self-contained.
Gender: Romance, adult, contemporary.
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.
Hello, readers! This is my first review and for that I decided that it'd to be about this book. I read it in the beginning of the year and it was so good I want read it again right now.
Lucy is a twenty-seven years old woman that work hard in a editorial that had to to fuse with another publishing house, so that's why she has to share the office with her nemesis number one: Joshua Templeman. She always wanted work in a editorial, and now she is the right hand of one of the general manager, the other other hand is Joshua, for the other boss.
The book is narrated by Lucy in first person, and in the few firsts pages she make a introduction of all the situation that almost made me to withdraw it because I was in a reader lock, but fortunately, I didn't. And then is when we know Joshua, the person that makes the Lucy's life a hell, more or less, because she also makes his life a little more difficult. They have games (stupids and funny ones) as don't withdraw the look away or copy the moves of the other, and this games stop when the other laughs or cries, that bring to the novel a taste more ridiculous and delirious (in the good way, in my opinion) than others novels.
Ok, this was the introduction so you can know a little about the situation, until their bosses tell them that would be a new place in the company for only one of them, so they've to "compete" between them, and the one that get the job would be the boss of the other. For them, at least, to Lucy, that can't to happen, so they make a deal: the loser would renounce.
All that hate between them is nothing more a mascarade to hide all that sexual tension and that is more and more obvious then of a hot session of kissing in the lift (omg, this was amazing), the things change in their relationship and then they are involved in something more physical and seeing how far that could go. Here's where we see how, little by little, starts to grow up a friendship between them and something more too. The things get more hot, also more funny, because in the whole book it doesn't lose that amusing tone mixed with the romance.
«I have a theory. hating someone feels disturbingly similar to being in love with them. I've a lot of time to compare love and hate, and these are my observation. Love and hate ar visceral.»
Lucy was a good character, she was funny, hilarious sometimes, saying all that stupid things was running in her head. But (yes, there's a but), sometimes she was too desperate for sex and saying things of Joshua like she was only interested in his body (a good one, but that doesn't mean that she could repeat constantly all that stuff that evidently made him uncomfortable), so that part of her I didn't like at all, but fortunately, it doesn't happen many times.
And for other part, Joshua is the love of my life. In the beginning he was cold and maybe a little cruel, but then we can know him little by little, and for the first time of a while, he really wasn't what I was expecting for. Joshua seems as a playboy, cold and with a sex-appeal that he use in his benefice, but don't. Nothing of I said. He is cute and shy below that serious form of him. This character has nothing wrong, Joshua was a fresh air for me.
«Shyness takes so many different forms. Some people are shy and soft. Some, shy and hard. Or in Josh'case, shy, and wrapped in military-grade armor.»
The narration is simple, funny, not only in the dialogues but also in the thought of our main character and the descriptions. I read this book in less of 24hs, it was so dynamic and without boring parts, so yes, for me was a really good romance novel to fall in love and laugh loud.
(4.75/5)
Have you read it? Will you do? I read you!
