Rating: 
Summary: bad, bad, bad
Review: this is one of the worst books i have ever read. it has no wit, no nuance, nothing original to say. the author's take on dating and life in manhattan is one you've read about a million times (in much more interesting ways). it reminds me of a TV sitcom, but worse. the author's writing style is also tedious. did i mention that this book is awful? steer clear of it. anyone who hypes it is either lying or a big dum-dum.
Rating: 
Summary: just about perfect
Review: What's surprising about Love Monkey is not that it's so funny, but that it's so true. The laughs have a sort of philosophical bent to them; the tabloid headline writer at the heart of the book, Tom Ferrell, is a normal guy with all the expected obsessions (he thinks about girls a lot-in one hilarious scene, he talks to his, er, essence and gets some no-holds-barred advice about everything he's doing wrong) but he's also an interesting thinker. He has a deeply reflective, even wistful view of all of the bizarre things that go on in the bars and parties of New York when you're trying to find the perfect match. The scenes between him and his "sarcastic default date," a tv news producer named Bran, have a spark of sex as well as the spirit of intellectual combat between two people who deserve each other. And Bran's opposite number, a shy, pretty girl who works with Tom and sometimes seems to be willing to dump her boyfriend for him, reminds me of a lot of indecisive girls I've known who wanted to keep their options open and didn't care a lot about who gets hurt in the process. Overall, every character in the book seemed completely real, and it's that sense of truth-often sweet, sometimes not so-that makes the book exceptional. You won't soon forget it.
Rating:
Summary: a smash hit
Review: This book is just a dead-on, blisteringly funny look inside the guy mind-that neglected character who lives in his guy cave and thinks about guy stuff as he wonders whether he will ever get a serious girlfriend. Smith's hero, Tom Farrell, is a loveable, smart, essentially romantic but adrift newspaper hack living in New York City and trying to convince a tempting would-be ballerina that he's up to code. His outlook on life-as he puts it, "I played the field, and the field won"-will remind a lot of single people of how brutal dating can be and his utterly disarming honesty about his own faults will have women saying, "Uh-huh," and men saying, "Brother, I've been there with you." The thing about the Bridget Jones type books is, they're okay, but predictable. They also don't have the bracing dose of reality that you get from Sex and the City or this book. Love Monkey will keep you guessing about what our hero will learn (or not) all the way to the end. Did I mention that this is the funniest novel of the year?
Rating:
Summary: Manipulated by the author.....
Review: I do not enjoy reading a book that tells me key points in the story instead of showing them to me. I also felt further manipulated when the author already started setting up the main character as a complete loser, and went on and on portraying this ad naseum for several pages. One may look like a loser from the outside, but it doesn't necessarily mean one is a loser. The way one thinks about himself and his surrounding world is a more accurate means of defining the loserqueness of a person..... Needless to say, I did not last past Chapter One, which is too bad since I never got to the funny episodes that the back cover promises... How the hell do these books ever get published is another question to ponder on another day. I hope it is not a sign of literature going downhill from here.
Rating:
Summary: more fun than a barrel of....
Review: This book has so many nicely turned observations and sharp one-liners that I turned the pages breathlessly in search of the next laugh. I never had to wait long. Literally every page has something funny, and Smith takes no prisoners in dissecting the rules of the mating game in New York City at the turn of this century. It's sort of like Sex and the City meets Seinfeld, but with an old-fashioned element. It has the underpinnings of a 1930s screwball comedy like His Girl Friday, the kind of thing where seen-it-all reporters fire off wisecracks to each other and then everyone repairs to the nearest saloon so they can be even more hilarious. This is a crackling debut, one of the brightest of recent memory.
Rating:
Summary: too true, too true
Review: Love Monkey is one of the best looks inside the single guy's mind every conceived. The hero, Tom Farrell, is a loveable schmo who can't seem to get his juju working with any of a series of tantalizing lovelies, but as he schemes and dreams, he'll have you laughing uproariously and hoping (praying) that he finally figures out what he's doing wrong. Maybe he's trying too hard, or maybe he just falls in love too easily, but everyone who's ever had a raging, partially requited crush on someone will find ample reason to cheer.
Rating:
Summary: Funny and heartfelt beyond expectations
Review: I heard (and read) a lot of different reviews for LOVE MONKEY, then saw Kyle Smith read from it as part of a reading series and was surprised to find myself laughing at loud (I don't do it that often). So I bought it, and I was surprised by something else - how heartfelt it was, and how closely it mirrors the situations of people I know. LOVE MONKEY is about unrequited love, and especially unrequited love for someone who has unrequited love for someone else, and so on. Just like the main character in the book, I find myself thinking of a song...but I digress. Anyway, there are so many great lines in this book, great images and situations, that I had to start leaving scraps of paper in the pages so I could quote it to friends. It's not just the clever turns of phrase that got me (and there are many, many of them). It's that it was consistent, and that there was a really good story here. Love Monkey is deeper and better written than your standard "lad lit," but it's also much more enjoyable than your standard literary fiction. I started reading it at 11 p.m. and finished at 3:30. That's because I had to find out what happened. I wasn't disappointed. I read a few reviews that said the main character, Tom, is unlikeable - a typical bachelor, a man-boy. I'm female, and I'm not a fan of arrogant men, but I liked Tom and sympathized with him. He tries to do the right thing. It's clear that he wants to find one woman to love, and he'd likely be happy to stick with her, but it's held just out of his reach. He's a cad only by default. Anyway, sometimes I have trouble finding a good read, but this was a good read. So I got on Amazon at 4 a.m. to tell other people that I think it's worth reading, too. And if you can't relate to the protagonist, you've probably had it easier in the early-thirtysomething world than a lot of us, but that's OK.
Rating: 
Summary: "We all love the chaos of love, chaos is sexy."
Review: "Welcome to the world of groovy, trendy and love torn Manhattan, where the main protagonist of this story, the hip Tom Farrell is anxiously searching for love, and treating his paramours like a deck of cards. Love Monkey is an entertaining, acerbic, if not uneven tale of a typical Manhattan single guy. Writing headlines for a New York tabloid that prides itself in trash news and sensationalistic stories, Tom at thirty-two has resigned himself to an uncomplicated life of bachelorhood. Tom is a new type of modern, urban anti-hero, a man who chronologically is thirty-two but is mentally a "thirteen-year-old with a credit card." He's not a man but "a manboy" who looks towards his married friends with a kind of cynical caution mixed with twisted humor, and wonders whether he should be doing the same thing. When he falls for his gorgeous co-worker Julia, who proves to be too hard to get, Tom courts the sardonic, mocking, and world wise Bran. He spends a lot of time reflecting on how he can improve his relationships with both women, and also on the "secret sorrows of men and the stated needs of women" Tom is playing the field and the field has one. The novel pretty much centers around Tom's ruminations on longing and forgiveness and also how wise people learn to love each other's imperfections. He spends much of his time taking advice from his close personal adviser, Shooter. Shooter, a total misogynist has insecurities of his own to hide, and his darker side comes to the forefront in one hilarious scene when he drags Tom and his friends Rollo and Mike to a strip club. Love Monkey is packed with some funny moments: Tom wrapped in false frivolity and counterfeit mirth, and madly courting Julia, is invited to spend some time with Julia's family when he is confronted with his arch nemesis Duane " a storky dork, all elbow and knee" who is also pursuing Julia. The novel is packed with self-reflective and, at times, juvenile reveries on men and what they find attractive in women, and also what Tom and friends presumably perceive as the qualities that women find striking in men. The narrative is also peppered with references to popular culture and most particularly the songs of Bob Dylan, which Tom seems to see as indicative of his stage in life. And in a type of emotional purging he constantly imbues the story with lists of his favourite things along with emails indicating his tortured correspondence with Liesl, a German girl with whom he has a brief fling with. The story reflects the multiplex of Tom's mind; "it's always playing on one screen, in an endless loop." I liked the way Smith infuses the narrative with the events of September 11th and he doesn't shy away from describing the tragedy of the day. Smith, however, never lets the drama of the day undermine the believability of Tom's character - a week later Tom is back to his old "girl crazy" self, squirming his way through dates and acerbically commenting on the chaos of the world around him. The story does have problems - some of the dialogue is a little over-written and there is a tendency for Tom to do a little too much whining, and some of the more sensitive female readers may be shocked at several of the bawdier misogynistic jokes. Generally though, Love Monkey is quite an astute, funny, and intelligent look at a man who still loves like a monkey - a man who has never really grown up. Mike Leonard April 04.
Rating:
Summary: Spank this monkey
Review: Kyle Smith's novel "Love Monkey" sure has been getting a lot of press recently. I saw several articles floating around the Internet about it, usually referring to it as a prime example of a new literary genre called "guy lit," or some similar thing. What guy lit tries to do is marshal the forces of the testosterone militia to answer the salvos fired by chick lit. I had never read any chick lit until right before I read Smith's novel, so the whole genre was a big mystery to me. I often see chick lit books on the shelves during my jaunts to the brick and mortar bookshops. Those books are often the ones with covers so blindingly bright that they look like someone dunked them in radioactive material. Chick lit books also have drawings of women on the front cover, usually wearing some sort of flashy outfit, along with a title that looks like a third grader wrote it in cursive. The book jacket for Smith's book avoids such effeminate trappings; it has a snapshot of a woman with extremely nice legs-and wearing a very tight skirt-sitting on a barstool. O.K., now I'm interested. Interested enough to read the book, in fact, despite seeing a few extremely negative reviews for the novel. And read it I did. "Love Monkey" is the story of a manboy, his love for cereal and Bob Dylan, his lousy job at a tabloid, and his painful love life in New York City. Tom Ferrell is a thirty something jerk with a saucy mouth and a cynical attitude who just wants to meet the right girl, sleep with her, and move on to the next conquest. Marriage is out of the question, at least on the surface. Ferrell would rather juggle a series of babes in his quest for...well, I don't now what he's seeking. His job as a rewriter for a New York rag promises him nothing but obscurity. He's got issues with his mother, but never resolves them. His love life is a series of expensive dates occasionally punctuated with all too brief physical encounters. What Ferrell spends most of his time doing, as far as I can tell from the book, involves thinking up ultra hip, smart alecky observations about the world as he sees it. After wading through pages and pages of pop culture tinged zingers, I began to despair. Is "Love Monkey" ever going to go anywhere? Then Tom Ferrell tells us about Julia, and the story takes off. Julia is about ten years younger than Tom, very good looking, and expresses some interest in our hero. Ferrell lays it all out for us as he takes us back in time to his first awkward dates with his dream babe. A paragon of honesty and integrity, Tom's intentions with Julia are completely above board; he constantly attempts to ply her with alcohol in the long tried and true guy tradition of always getting a girl drunk so they'll put out. On one date, Ferrell sets into motion a plan where three of his friends show up and pick a fight with Tom so he can act like a hero in front of his girl. Tom tries everything to win Julia over, even going so far as to compete directly with her boyfriend Dwayne by showing up at one of her cheesy dance recitals, brown nosing her parents and weird brother, and continuing to shower her with expensive meals and gifts. Sometimes Tom's actions pay off, sometimes not. No matter how many points he scores with Julia, he just cannot seem to pry her away from her boyfriend. In a weird reversal of the typical male-female arrangement, Ferrell cannot seem to get a commitment from Julia. Unfortunately for Tom, he has to juggle Julia with a cast of kooky friends and girlfriends. His primary male buddy is Shooter, a rich, handsome snob who always has a gorgeous babe hanging off his arm. Shooter likes to call Ferrell up at odd times and fire off "helpful" aphorisms about women and life. Then there is Bran Lowenstein, Tom's occasional consort. She's a mouthy gal always ready to put our man in his place. Along with Bran comes Liesl, a pretty lefty lawyer Ferrell is looking to mess around with, and Kate, an aspiring lawyer who also shows some interest. We cannot forget Tom's obnoxious co-workers, fellow journalists even more insane than the protagonist. One of these guys, Tom tells us, has breath resembling a "spritz of Mace." Nice. I always knew New Yorkers and bad hygiene went together. For someone who obviously isn't a people person, Tom Ferrell sure has a lot of friends and acquaintances. The story veers in a slightly different direction after the September 11th terrorist attacks (which Tom witnesses personally), and his relationships fundamentally change as well. The book ends on both a good and a bad note. I liked "Love Monkey" in some respects. I chuckled at most of the characters, enjoyed the descriptions of the madhouse that is tabloid journalism in the Big Apple, and laughed aloud over some of his sarcastic comments. Unfortunately, the verbal acrobatics are funny to start with but soon drag as the story wears on. Even the wittiest bloke comes off as a bore if all you hear are pithy comments about world weariness. I'm also getting tired of hearing how New York is the center of the galaxy. If it is, the galaxy could do better. Tom Ferrell often reveals how shallow, narcissistic, and downright lame New Yorkers are. I don't take everything Smith writes to heart because I do know a few people from the Big Apple who are nothing like the characters in this book. Give "Love Monkey" a shot; it's not the best book I've read this year, but it's worth a look.
Rating:
Summary: a welcome surprise
Review: This kind of book normally follows a well worn and predictable path, but Love Monkey turns out to be an almost uniquely well designed, consistently surprising story backed by a nonstop barrage of hilarious one-liners. This is right up there with High Fidelity for its ability to cut to the bone of what men are all about when they stumble into a relationship, but it also has a superbly realized supporting cast (Rollo, the barfly/tabloid hack/elder statesmen; Shooter, the cool black guy whose dreadlocks and devil-may-care attitude make women swoon; Bran, the hard-driving TV reporter who may or may not be the love of our hero's life) and it draws an impressively detailed picture of what life is like for young New Yorkers on the make, the kinds of people who go to book parties mainly to guzzle the free wine, even though the guest of honor happens to be ex-President Bill Clinton. It's certain to be a book sophisticated readers will be buzzing about this summer.
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