The Hating Game

I read The Hating Game on a flight and laughed out loud twice, which is my highest compliment for a romcom. Sally Thorne, an Australian author, published it as her debut with William Morrow on August 9, 2016, a 384 page workplace romance that became a word-of-mouth hit, a TikTok staple, and eventually a movie starring Lucy Hale. The premise is catnip. Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman are executive assistants to the co-CEOs of Bexley and Gamin, a publishing company formed by merger, and they share one office, one wall of mutual loathing, and a set of ritual games. Then a single promotion opens up, and their cold war goes hot.

The book opens with a dictionary definition, nemesis, ending with Joshua Templeman, and that tells you the voice immediately. Lucy narrates in first person, fizzy, funny, self-deprecating, obsessed with being liked. She is short, curvy, fond of bright red lipstick and vintage dresses, and she has decided Josh is her enemy with the total commitment of a woman with no other enemies. Josh is tall, dark, meticulous, fond of staring at her until she squirms, and apparently returns the feeling. They play the Staring Game across their desks. The Mirror Game, copying each other's movements. The HR Game, baiting each other into complaints. It is ridiculous. It is also, Thorne makes clear from early on, the most alive part of both their days.

What elevates the setup above standard enemies-to-lovers is that the hatred is doing work. Lucy needs Josh to hate her because being hated by one safe person lets her keep being sweet to everyone else. Josh needs Lucy as a sparring partner because nobody else at work sees him clearly. Their games are flirtation wearing a false mustache, and Thorne lets the reader figure that out a beat before Lucy does, which is exactly the right gap. You spend the first act shouting at her while adoring her.

The promotion and the elevator

The plot ignites when the co-CEOs announce a new chief operating officer role. Lucy and Josh both want it. They agree to terms that raise everything. Whoever gets the promotion stays. Whoever loses resigns. Winner takes the office, the job, and the last laugh. Lucy, who has always believed nice girls can win, throws herself into proving she is executive material. Josh, who everyone assumes will win on competence, starts acting strangely, mentoring her in job interviews, noticing her moods, lingering.

The hinge scene arrives in an elevator. After a paintball team-building outing where they end up muddy, competitive, and weirdly tender, Lucy and Josh get stuck, or nearly, and the tension snaps. He kisses her, thoroughly, against the elevator wall, and then panics at his own loss of control. Lucy spends the next chapters replaying those seconds the way only a smart overthinker can, cataloguing evidence. The dreams start. The wardrobe upgrades. The staring game acquires a new charge. Thorne writes Lucy's confusion with comic precision. She is a woman revising a thesis in real time, and every new data point, Josh remembering how she takes her coffee, Josh defending her to a client, Josh looking wrecked when she cries, contradicts the hatred hypothesis.

Meanwhile the office politics deepen. Their bosses, the jovial Mr. Bexley and the sharp Ms. Gamin, merged companies and temperaments, and Lucy starts to see the merger's fault lines in her own rivalry. Josh's perfectionism gets context. His father is ill, his family carries expectations, and his coldness at work is partly armor over a private life that is fraying. Lucy's sweetness gets context too. She grew up craving approval after a childhood that taught her love must be earned by pleasing, and her people-pleasing is not just charm but strategy. The book is kinder to both of them than they are to each other, and much kinder than they are to themselves.

The middle act runs on delicious tension. A business trip to Berkeley forces proximity, shared rental car, one hotel with limited options, the classic machinery deployed with enthusiasm. Lucy meets Josh's family and sees him loved and teased, a different man from the office statue. Josh meets Lucy's insecurities and answers them without games for the first time. They sleep together, finally, in a scene that is explicit, consensual, and emotionally loaded, and wake up to the same problem. The promotion decision is coming. One of them will have to leave.

Interviews, resignations, and the truth

The final act is where Thorne proves she is doing more than banter. Both Lucy and Josh interview for the COO role, and the process exposes what each actually wants. Lucy discovers, mid-interview, that she has been chasing the title more than the work, and that her real talent, reading people, building loyalty, making publishing human, does not need Josh's defeat to matter. Josh, for his part, has been offered an exit all along, a role elsewhere that he has hidden because leaving Lucy, even as an enemy, felt worse than losing to her.

The reveal about Josh reframes the whole book. He applied for the promotion partly to stay near her. His games were courtship all along, clumsy, intense, male. Whether that lands for you depends on your tolerance for the secret-pining reveal. I found it satisfying because Thorne seeded it fairly. Josh's staring, his memorized details, his fury when other men notice Lucy, all read differently once you know. The book even lets Lucy be angry about being managed, about Josh making career decisions around her without telling her. She does not simply melt. She makes him earn the confession.

The ending gives both characters their due. Without spoiling the decision, the promotion resolves in a way that lets neither victory nor defeat define them. Josh resigns first, removing the resign-or-stay stakes, and Lucy must choose what she wants with a clear field. The epilogue, wedding-adjacent and warm, brings back the office crew and the games, now played for love. The final image, two people who started with a dictionary definition of hatred arriving at something neither can define but both can live in, closes the loop the first page opened.

Josh, decoded

The book's central trick deserves a closer look. Lucy narrates everything, which means Josh arrives pre-interpreted. Cold. Hostile. Terrifying. Every stare is an attack, every silence a judgment. Thorne sustains this misreading for hundreds of pages while planting the counter-evidence in plain sight, and rereading the early chapters with knowledge of the ending is a genuine pleasure. The staring is attention. The silence is restraint. The fury when Lucy dates someone else is jealousy he has no right to feel. Thorne plays fair. Every clue was visible. Lucy simply refused the hypothesis that the man who hates her loves her, because accepting it would require changing everything about herself.

This is also where the book is smartest about insecurity. Josh's armor gets most of the attention, the sick father, the family expectations, the fear that softness equals failure. But Lucy's sweetness is armor too, and the book knows it. She performs niceness the way Josh performs coldness, as a strategy learned young. Being liked by everyone means never risking real rejection. Hating Josh safely means never admitting she wants him. When she finally tells him the truth about her family, about growing up feeling second-best and performing brightness to earn love, the confession lands because Thorne has shown the performance for 300 pages. The games were the one place Lucy allowed herself to be aggressive, petty, and real. No wonder she played so hard.

The supporting cast sharpens both leads. Lucy's colleagues see the dynamic clearly and say so in dialogue that lets the reader feel clever. Josh's brother and father reveal the warmth he hides at work. Even the bosses function as foils. Bexley and Gamin merged their companies the way Lucy and Josh must merge their certainties, with friction, compromise, and eventual affection. The parallel is never stated. It does not need to be.

The film and the formula

The 2021 movie adaptation, with Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell, is faithful in the ways that matter and instructive in what it changes. The games survive intact, the leads have real chemistry, and the office looks right. What the film cannot carry is Lucy's interiority, the anxious narration that makes her obliviousness charming rather than stupid on the page. On screen she reads as slower to catch on. In prose she reads as a woman thinking at full speed in the wrong direction. The difference is the difference between the media, and it reminded me how much of this book's pleasure lives in voice rather than plot.

As for the formula, The Hating Game essentially rebuilt workplace enemies-to-lovers for the 2010s, and dozens of books followed its beats. Reading it now, the machinery shows. Shared office, forced proximity, single promotion, elevator kiss, secret pining reveal, grovel, epilogue. Thorne did not invent these parts, but she assembled them with unusual polish and, crucially, with jokes that still land. The imitators often copy the beats without the voice. This book's durability comes from Lucy's sentences, not its structure. Strip the banter and the formula is bare. Keep the banter and the formula sings.

What works and what drags

What works is voice and chemistry. Lucy's narration is genuinely funny, with similes that land more often than they miss, and the banter between the leads crackles from their first scene. Josh, who could have been a cold alpha cutout, gets interiority through Lucy's slow understanding and through his own actions, which consistently contradict his frost. The publishing setting is used well. These are people who love books, and their fights about manuscripts and authors give the romance texture beyond the office. The spice, when it arrives, is enthusiastic and mutual, and the emotional beats underneath it are real.

What drags is the middle's repetitiveness. The games, delightful at first, cycle a few times too many before the elevator changes the terms. Lucy's obliviousness, necessary for the slow burn, strains belief around page 250. Everyone else in the building can see what is happening. A subplot about Lucy's ex and a Freitag family wedding adds pages without adding much. And the billionaire-adjacent polish of the ending, dream jobs materializing for both, sits oddly beside the book's otherwise grounded office realism. Real publishing does not have that many corner offices.

Still, The Hating Game earns its reputation as the modern workplace romcom benchmark. It is funny on purpose, sexy without shame, and smarter about its characters' wounds than the banter suggests.

A final note on the games

I keep thinking about why the games work as a romantic device rather than just comedy. Each game has rules, stakes, and a winner, which means Lucy and Josh can compete without vulnerability. Competition is safe intimacy. It provides contact, attention, and excitement while forbidding tenderness. The genius of the book is showing how the games evolve. The staring game becomes looking. The mirror game becomes empathy. The HR game, weaponized paperwork, becomes the one game neither will play when it matters. By the end they have run out of games, which is exactly the point. Love, in Thorne's telling, is what happens when the rules stop protecting you. Read it when you want to laugh and swoon in equal measure. Just do not start the Staring Game with your own coworker. Some games only work in fiction, and this book knows it, even as it makes you wish otherwise.