We meander on to the ending in which they all go on vacation together with her twin brother Jamie, and it’s implied Tom will propose to Darcy. After a lot of Tom turning her down and attempting and failing to ignore Darcy, they eventually do the sex thing. The dialogue is unfocused there is little tension over “will they or won’t they,” since it’s fairly obvious that the hero, Tom, is completely in love with the heroine, Darcy, and makes miniature confessions to that effect along the way. In 99 Percent Mine, a character unlikable at first became progressively more and more unlikable as the book goes on. Via this plot point, we learn that he’s also reciprocally spying on her, seeming to be as obsessed with her as she is with him. We find out all sorts of info about Josh through her spying, observation, and rumination on what he does every day she does goofy things like keep track of which day of the week he wears certain coloured shirts in a repetitive cycle, and tries to decipher the meaning of the little marks he makes on his paper calendar. We come to understand that even though Lucy legitimately hates Josh, she’s also legitimately obsessed with him.

With each new exchange, we learn little tidbits of information about the frenemies.

Thorne has a zinger-laced writing style that worked very well in The Hating Game, with her hero and heroine constantly trading insults and gloating about their successes at the other’s expense. Despite the troubling tendency of a few of the one-liners in The Hating Game to be borderline racist, make fun of mental illness and fat people, the book as a whole makes this premise work, generating incredible chemistry through the leads’ banter. The premise of The Hating Game is: rival coworkers are both dead-set on getting a promotion which will promote one of them above the other they work in the same office alone, where they snipe at and insult each other constantly. The general premise of 99 Percent Mine is: badass bartender girl is renovating her deceased grandmother’s cottage with the help of her closest childhood friend whom she’s hopelessly in love with. Meanwhile, Sally Thorne’s follow-up novel, 99 Percent Mine, receives mostly middling reviews with a good portion of the readership absolutely hating it, calling it massively disappointing after the success of The Hating Game. It’s widely recommended and extremely popular.

Full of witty banter and written in a distinctive voice, it was fun, memorable, and entirely sold me on the chemistry between the two leads. The Hating Game is one of the best books I read last year.

99 percent mine book