The Hating Game

this book was so much fun?! can't even remember the last time i enjoyed a romance this much. everything about this was fantastic. the writing was witty and engaging, and the characters honestly jumped off the page for me and i really cared about how they were going to progress. I loved both lucy and joshua individually so much, and together they were just ... so good. the tension was so well written, and balanced so well, i have no words, i just adored it. i immediately went back and read the first two chapters after i finished it, haha.

11/17/21 - coming back to this in 2021, four years after reading it ... realizing my rating is definitely not 5 stars. but i want to respect my original enjoyment of this book so i'm just bringing it down to 4 stars instead of 3, which i think it objectively is. definitely a decent trad pub contemporary het romance. probably one of the better ones! but i think i'm realizing looking back now that when i first started reading romance, i (1) was incredibly unaware of the issues in trad pub het romance and was super uncritical/unaware as a reader and (2) didn't even really know what my own taste was. thinking on it now, i remember a lot about this book and i don't think it was bad, but also it feels very basic. and i personally think that's a problem. but maybe i'm just growing out of the contemporary het, so i'm leaving my rating at 4 stars. idk.