Editors Reads Verdict
Sally Thorne's debut novel is the gold standard of the workplace enemies-to-lovers romance: the tension is precisely calibrated, the hero is worth waiting for, and the slow burn reaches a temperature that leaves readers genuinely breathless. It set a template that dozens of subsequent romances have attempted and rarely matched.
What We Loved
- The tension between Lucy and Josh is built with extraordinary patience and precision
- Josh Templeman is one of contemporary romance's most beloved heroes — intimidating, then tender
- The office setting creates natural, believable constraints that raise the stakes
- Thorne's prose is sharp and funny — Lucy's interior monologue is a genuine pleasure
Minor Drawbacks
- The plot's reliance on misunderstanding and withheld information will frustrate some readers
- A few secondary plot elements feel underdeveloped
- The ending rushes slightly after an exceptionally patient setup
Key Takeaways
- → The slow burn is most effective when every interaction carries visible emotional stakes
- → A romance hero who is intimidating to others but openly tender with the heroine is a proven and satisfying archetype
- → Workplace constraints create natural dramatic tension that fuels rather than complicates the romance
- → Physical proximity in confined spaces is one of romance's oldest and most reliable engines
- → The best enemies-to-lovers arcs show why the hostility was protective for both parties
| Author | Sally Thorne |
|---|---|
| Publisher | William Morrow Paperbacks |
| Pages | 384 |
| Published | August 9, 2016 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Romance, Contemporary Fiction |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Romance readers who love slow burns, workplace settings, and heroes with a forbidding exterior and an exceptionally soft interior. |
The Workplace War
Lucy Hutton and Josh Templeman work across from each other at Bexley & Gamin Publishing, a merged company where Lucy’s former boss and Josh’s former boss are now co-CEOs. They have separate loyalties, opposing personalities, and a mutual antagonism so thoroughgoing that they’ve turned it into a game with elaborate rules.
Lucy is sunshine and effort and color-coded pens. Josh is blue eyes and silence and a face that most people find unapproachable. They play Mirror, they play Elevator Button, they play HR Complaint. Every interaction is a chess move.
Sally Thorne’s genius is in the precision of this setup. The tension is not vague or manufactured — it has specific games, specific rules, specific stakes. When it begins to crack, it cracks in specific, earned ways.
The Slow Burn Mechanics
What makes The Hating Game enduringly popular is Thorne’s patience. The book runs almost 400 pages, and she does not rush the transformation of hate into love. Instead she builds it through accumulation: the moments when the mask slips, the moments when each character does something for the other that their war shouldn’t allow, the moments when the reader sees what Lucy and Josh can’t yet see about themselves.
Josh Templeman occupies a particular place in the romance reader’s pantheon. He is genuinely difficult — cold in public, economical with words, seemingly untouchable. The revelation that this exterior conceals something quite different is done in stages, each one recalibrating the reader’s understanding of everything that came before.
Lucy’s Voice
One of the underrated pleasures of the book is Lucy’s first-person narration. She is funny and self-aware and slightly unreliable in the way that people are unreliable when they’re in denial about what they feel. Her running commentary on Josh — why he’s infuriating, why she keeps noticing things about him, why she absolutely does not care what he thinks about her outfit — is a masterclass in romantic dramatic irony.
A Template for the Genre
The Hating Game influenced a generation of workplace romance novels that followed. Its specific combination of slow burn, enemies-to-lovers, and a hero who is actually worth the wait established expectations for the subgenre that most subsequent entries have had to contend with.
Our rating: 4.2/5 — The definitive modern workplace romance, built on a slow burn that earns every degree of its temperature.
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