References as Romance
Review: Joshua Hortinela’s Hate You to Love You
Atria Australia, 9781761637780, 1 September 2026
Reviewed by Kate Cuthbert
Bookish Australia will already be familiar with Joshua Hortinela as the bookseller with a wide smile, sharing his love of tote bags and romantic comedies in behind-the-scenes social media posts about his job and the books that he loves. News of his debut romance novel travelled through Australian Bookstagram like wildfire, with an enormous amount of excitement and goodwill.
There’s a strange kind of parasociality to reviewing this book, one that I suspect is only going to grow as more and more social media personalities turn their hands to writing genre fiction (though I note that Hortinela’s place in this category is much more authentic and significantly less controversial than other recent Atria acquisitions). His beloved online presence is already being leveraged towards the success of this title and in the marketing budget. Hate You to Love You has had a strong presence in the lead-up to its September release, with novelty ARCs, sprayed edges, and a number of pre-launch events for readers and book influencers.
The book, a romance novel, follows Carlos, the protagonist, through what the back cover blurb calls a ‘quarter-life crisis’. Three years after his first love, Elliot, leaves him and Australia for a dream role in London publishing, Carlos feels like he’s losing everything. His beloved father has passed away, his sharehouse has broken up, and his friends are moving on to new adventures. Everyone has momentum, moving them further and further away from Carlos and the great life he thought he was leading. It’s affecting him personally, but also professionally. As a writer who once wrote whimsical and optimistic pieces for a youth media site, Carlos is increasingly turning in staid, uninspired articles and his future as an employed writer is joining the crowd disappearing into the sunset.
When a one-last-chance assignment comes to him – an in-depth interview with one of Australia’s most beloved and mysterious writers, a chance to redeem himself as a writer and maybe find an adventure of his own, Carlos doesn’t so much jump at it as tumble sideways with a lethargy and melancholia that irritates everyone around him. His malaise feels prophetic when the author’s publicist is his ex-boyfriend Elliot, and the European leg of the tour requires them to be constantly in each other’s presence.
Elliot now leads a successful life in London, a senior publicist with a reputation for developing innovative and increasingly successful campaigns for authors and their books. He isn’t particularly thrilled to see Carlos either, but his priority is Claudia Leighton and the successful launch of her upcoming book. Carlos is just one more detail he has to manage.
That we know so much about the author before opening the cover makes the distinction between Hortinela and Carlos blur substantially. This raises questions (out of the scope of this review) about the evolution of the romance novel, as more and more LGBTQIA+ authors claim space in the genre. Women writing romance have long had to push back on deeply intrusive and often predatory questions about their ‘research’; men writing in the genre, even if they’re writing queer characters, seem to be able to draw from their own experience much more freely, without facing the same criticism or sly innuendo.
And draw, Hortinela does. As the narrative carves out space for passages on the value of romcoms and long descriptions of different bookstores, the focus strays from Carlos’s emotional journey, the growth he develops towards healthier expressions of fear and grief, and the ways that Carlos and Elliot find their way back to each other. That story is still there, but ironically feels tacked onto the descriptions of bookshelves and plotlines, travelogues and totebags. Carlos’s arrested development when hit with true grief, and his inability to see the stagnant nature of a film where characters never change or grow, could provide a poignant twist on a traditional bildungsroman, where a character hides in fiction to avoid having to face the mundanity of real life, but is never fully developed.
Similarly, Elliot’s anxiety could be a compelling representation of the pressures facing the publishing industry and young people trying to begin careers in a space where the blueprints are no longer relevant. Instead, the novel dances along the surface, a bit like Elliot’s PR campaign for Claudia’s book: a lot of glitz and glam, but ultimately no opportunity to dive into the substance underneath. Carlos’s eventual confrontation with not only Elliot but his mother and his friends lacks the emotional resonance it could have had, had it been more present in the text. Similarly, his repairwork, where he is able to recognise himself as the villain of his own life, fails to land as a key character development moment.
What does land are the homages: key scenes take place at various romcom destinations including the Notting Hill blue door; Carlos is intermittently clumsy at moments of peak embarrassment; Claudia Leighton’s secrets are revealed in a love story treasure hunt. Readers will find Easter eggs and winks aplenty as they make their way through, and may come away with a watch and read list of romantic comedy’s greatest hits.
If media forms the primary cohesion between character and plot, bookstores are a strong second. Carlos, like Hortinela, is a Sydney local and he namechecks many of Sydney’s iconic bookshops, and then takes time out of his busy tour schedule to visit bookshops (and collect totebags) through London and Dublin. His reading is broader than his film-watching, but still includes a number of romance novels, also name-checked and sometimes described as part of the text.
In the end, there is charm here and Hortinela has an easy way of writing that will carry readers through the story. However, by blurring the lines between the character and the author so completely, I felt disconnected – what was story? What was author? And, in many ways, what was clever marketing? Ultimately, this novel felt more like a lengthy love letter to the author’s interests, but not a love story standing on its own. I hope future works will see a stronger confidence as a creator to be inspired by, but not beholden to, the stories that he clearly loves so much. I’ll go to my own local bookstore to buy a copy.
Hate You to Love You
Joshua Hortinela
Atria Australia, 9781761637780, 1 September 2026
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Dr Kate Cuthbert is the founder and director of Enough Trope, and a publishing industry professional with 20 years experience across the sector. She has held senior roles at Books+Publishing, Pantera Press, Writers Victoria and she launched the Escape Publishing imprint at Harlequin Australia. Her book on the creation, impact, and language of book covers and titles, How to Judge a Book by its Cover, was released in 2025. She co-hosts the popular Bridgerton podcast What Would Danbury Do?