Narrated by Katie Schorr
If you’re part of the online romance community in even the smallest way, you are unlikely to have missed all the buzz about Sally Thorne’s début novel, The Hating Game, a flirty, funny and sexy Rom Com between two co-workers who are forced to share an office following the merger of the two publishing companies for which they work.
Lucinda – Lucy – Hutton and Joshua Templeman hated each other on sight. Or so they tell themselves. But unfortunately, their roles as executive assistants to the CEOs of Gamin Publishing and Bexley Publishing respectively, mean they spend their days in forced proximity, and have, over the past year, honed their verbal sniping and games of one-upmanship – some of them rather juvenile but nonetheless very funny – into an art form.
Lucy firmly identifies with the Gamin Publishing company, having an artistic, rather bohemian self-image, while she places Joshua firmly in the Bexley camp, rigid and boringly efficient, exemplified by the fact that he organises his shirts by the days of the week, wearing the same colour on a particular day. She’s well-liked, charming and helpful, where Josh is a bully whose fearsome scowls and bad temper are legendary.
After around a year of constant mutual animosity and bickering, Lucy and Josh are both invited to apply for a newly created executive position which could potentially make one of them the other one’s boss. Neither is prepared to work for the other should they not get the promotion – so it’s time to up the ante and play this game for real.
But the stakes change when Lucy has a date with another colleague and the green-eyed monster rears its ugly head. Escorting Lucy downstairs, Josh stops the elevator and kisses her with the sort of passionate intensity that almost literally scrambles her brain. And a few days later, when she becomes unwell, it’s Josh who gets her home and looks after her, even going so far as to get his brother – a doctor – out of bed in the middle of the night to check on her. And of course, Lucy has Josh’s back later in the book when he needs her.
The storyline of the colleagues who think they hate each other is a well-used one, but The Hating Game deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it in recent weeks. Sally Thorne has used the trope well and, in Lucy and Josh, has created a couple of flawed but engaging and complex protagonists who take on lives of their own in the imagination. I do have a few quibbles, though. Lucy and Josh never seem to do much work, and there is more telling than showing when it comes to the workplace so that we never really know exactly why these two people are thought to be so good at their jobs. On the other hand, however, Ms. Thorne does an excellent job when it comes to revealing the truth of Josh’s character given that we only see him through Lucy’s eyes. It’s evident to the listener long before it is to Lucy that Josh is well-and-truly smitten by the way he acts and the things he says (the roses – swoon!) and that his sarcastic, overbearing manner is his way of hiding his shyness and the truth about how he feels. He’s shown time and again to be a truly nice guy with an attractive underlying vulnerability; his family situation has left him a little emotionally bruised and his experience with women who wanted him only for his pretty face and great body means he finds it difficult to believe in himself as an essentially decent person. But I defy any reader or listener not to fall for him – he’s just lovely.
Lucy is vibrant and bubbly, and one of the few people who stands up (despite her diminutive five-feet-nothing height) to Josh and challenges him. She’s a bit of a loner though, having lost her best friend when that friend lost her job in the merger, and her parents, while loving and supportive, don’t quite understand her need to make her own way when there’s a perfectly good family business she could have gone into.
Ultimately, this is a terrific, feel-good and, best of all, beautifully romantic story. The lack of strong secondary characters is noticeable, but it does allow Ms. Thorne more time with her two principals and for their relationship to unfold at a fairly leisurely pace.
Katie Schorr is a new-to-me-narrator, but I see she has around forty titles to her credit at Audible and that quite a few of those are of titles categorised at Chick Lit. Her natural speaking voice is light and animated, her diction is clear and her pacing is good; she’s a good fit for Lucy, who narrates the entire book. She captures Lucy’s dry humour well for the most part, but there are a few places where her vocal acting falls short and doesn’t really convey the emotions that are indicated in the text. The best example of this is in the major love scene that takes place near the end. There isn’t much dialogue, but what there is, together with Lucy’s narrative comments, indicates it is an intense scene, yet Ms. Schorr’s tone and method of delivery doesn’t really alter and I was left feeling a bit flat after what was supposed to have been a passionate culmination of all the teasing and sniping that had led up to it.
I also found it difficult at times to tell the difference between Lucy’s speech and her narrative. If you’ve read the book, then you’ll know that there are more than a few occasions when Lucy makes aside comments to herself, which are indicated in the text by the use of italics. In the audio, however, Ms. Schorr doesn’t make any clear distinction between what is Lucy’s narrative, what she is saying and what she is thinking, which sometimes makes the whole thing seem disjointed.
Her character differentiation is fine for the most part – the two bosses are easily distinguishable, as are the various family members and friends who appear briefly, but there were times I couldn’t quite distinguish Lucy from Josh. Most of the time, though, it’s clear who is who; Ms. Schorr doesn’t appear to have a particularly wide range in terms of pitch, but she drops it a little and gives Josh a bit of a growl which works well and makes him sound quite sexy when called for.
The Hating Game is a thoroughly enjoyable book, and while my personal preference would probably be for the print version, the audio is not without its merits. I’d definitely recommend it to romance fans – especially those who, like me, don’t go for many contemporaries – and will certainly be on the lookout for more from this talented new author.
Caz
Narration: B
Book Content: B+
Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in
Violence Rating: None
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Publisher: Harper Audio
The Hating Game was provided to AudioGals by Harper Audio for a review.
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Great review, Caz! I think I will go for the print version first. Clear differentiation between female and male characters as wells as between speech and narrative is an important factor in this genre. Thank you!
You know, as I was writing up the narration part of the review, I remembered a discussion a few of us had at AAR just a week or so ago about this book, and how the publishers seem to be positioning it as Chick Lit rather than contemporary romance. The cover is very Chick Lit and one of my fellow reviewers there said that this had been chosen as her book club read and that there were people there reading it who would never pick up a romance.
When I looked up the narrator at AudioGals, I discovered that she’s narrated quite a bit of Chick Lit, and that makes me wonder if the requirements for narrating that particular genre are different to what is normally expected by romance readers. It’s been a while since I’ve read any Chick Lit, but I seem to recall that the focus is firmly on the female protagonist and the male characters are fairly secondary. So perhaps the differentiation aspect and the need for emotional realism aren’t such a big thing in that genre.
Katie Schorr does a good job for the most part – I just wish they’d used a good romance narrator.
Thanks for the review and recommendation. I was waiting for the book price to go down a bit and had considered getting the audio. So, will bite the bullet and pick up the print version.
I enjoyed both, but the print version has the edge for me. One thing that confused me a bit was that the author is Australian, although the book doesn’t have a strong sense of place, so could almost be set in any large city. Yet the audio is very firmly placed in the US simply because the narrator is American.
Hopefully, the price will come down a bit soon!
That may be the case. I don’t rule out the audio version, perhaps at some point it comes out as a deal at Audible or it goes whispersync.
I listened to The Hating Game and my grade is probably a B- for narration and B+ for content. However, that said, I very much enjoyed it as an audiobook. I thought several times what a truly great romance audio this would have been in the right narrator’s hands. I honestly think a Renee Raudman or Karen White or Xe Sands (among others) could have made the content come in at an A-.
Still, I probably will relisten to this one someday. Overall, I was really entertained.
Yep, I’m sure a good ROMANCE narrator would have sorted out those bits and pieces I mentioned as not having quite worked.