The Hating Game by Sally Thorne
Published 2016 · 82,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Romance
How hard is The Hating Game to read?
The Hating Game scores 19 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 20 out of 100
- Office-setting vocabulary. Clean, accessible prose with sharp dialogue.
- Sentence structure: 18 out of 100
- Short, punchy sentences. Dialogue drives the narrative. Thorne writes for momentum.
- Abstraction: 18 out of 100
- Entirely concrete—physical proximity, verbal sparring, body language. The emotions live in gesture.
- Information density: 20 out of 100
- Streamlined office romance. Every scene serves the central tension between Lucy and Joshua.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- First-person from Lucy. Linear timeline. Readers see Joshua through Lucy's misinterpretations.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- The shared desk as battleground and intimacy. The elevator as liminal space. The 'games' as coded courtship.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- Lucy's narration is self-aware and funny. She knows she's protesting too much about Joshua.
- Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100
- The reader knows where this is going. The pleasure is in the how, not the what.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- Single POV, linear timeline, one central relationship. Classically simple romance structure.
How The Hating Game is regarded
The Hating Game holds a literary regard score of 50 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.