Rating: 
Summary: A twist on an old genre
Review: It's not really chick lit, but it sort of is - only it's a rooster, not a chick. Tom Farrell, tabloid rewrite hack in NYC, is a loser and is determined to pass himself off as a sensitive guy who's in touch with his feminine side. His goal: to win the heart of shallow and manipulative Julia, tho it's hard to see what he finds so appealing in her.
Hilarious, revealing, and sarcastic, Love Monkey is ultimately a sociological and psychological study of the male species on the hunt, and it's a gas.
Rating: 
Summary: only buy this if you like laughing
Review: The year is short, but I doubt there will be a funnier, more entertaining novel than Love Monkey published the rest of 2004. The clueless bachelor at the center of this tour de force, Tom Farrell, superficially resembles lots of people you may know in real life, but Smith brings him to life with a thousand perfectly chosen details and witheringly acute one-liners. He's a guy who is dedicating his life to trying to figure out how to attract women (should he be honest, vulnerable and sweet? Should he act more like an arrogant jerk?), and luckily (or unluckily) for him, he is close friends with an independently rich studpuppy named Shooter whose advice on what women really want is hilarious and totally on target. Advice in hand, Tom attempts to woo a series of beautiful, accomplished Manhattan women, from a wily dancer to a super-smart TV producer whose vinegary putdowns of Tom are well justified, even if you wish they would put aside their differences and finally get it on. The author shines a 400-watt light on the field of dating, previously only explored in various superficial ways by various writers who find it difficult to come up with truly memorable characters or any thoughts or dialogue that aren't the stuff of romance novels and cliche. Love Monkey is for readers who crave a comedy that is never bland but always real and convincing, an inside look at the dating circuit that offers far more genuine that-happened-to-me laughs and delves far deeper into the singleton's psyche than Sex and the City.
Rating:
Summary: sweetly funny
Review: You can't ask for a better time with your clothes on than Love Monkey. It's full of zingy observations, colorful characters, crackling good dialogue and a lot of hilariously embarrassing, and very true-sounding, dating mishaps. This is one of the best books for getting inside the male mind, and whether you like the hero of the book or not you will gain a crystal clear understanding of what men are thinking while they're chatting with you in a bar or at a party. Yes, the close-up, no-holds-barred details can be frightening. But it's very, very funny.
Rating: 
Summary: pass up this Monkey
Review: I read Kyle Smith's Love Monkey and didn't like it much, I have to say. Anybody who finds Paul Reiser funny might find Smith funny. But that's about it. Everybody else would find this kind of humor abysmal. What's more, the lines of dialogue feel rehashed from lots of different things you've watched and read before; I thought it just got annoying after a while. And the narcissistic tone of the whole enterprise put me off as well.
Rating:
Summary: date from hell talks..........
Review: I don't like these "lit" books that are not good literature. These sort of books tend to have characters with no morals, are self-indulgent till you want to slap the writer. Just leaves me cold. His talent as far as prose is very good - he is quality writer, but this is just gash. His characters is everyone woman's worst nightmare. This dicklit is a dud.Sorry, give it a thumbs down and spend your money on something worth it.
Rating:
Summary: really fun
Review: I zipped through this book very quickly and may have accidentally learned a few things about men in the bargain. (Like, deep down inside, they turn out to be shallow, and they have mom issues too. That's a relief). It's just a hilarious, insightful read that returns to Sex and the City land with the same kind of puns, putdowns, and semi-nutty characters. Highly recommended for anyone who likes snappy urban fiction or dating comedies.
Rating:
Summary: a talent to watch
Review: Love Monkey is a first novel that works on two different levels, and succeeds brilliantly on both of them. It's funny, wickedly so and with many a sharp edge directed at (for instance) super-parents, overachieving cell-phone obsessed New York professionals and people who try to chat with you in elevators. But it's also about an insightful guy taking stock of himself at a crossroads, and it's this reflective tone that puts me in mind of a latter day Catcher in the Rye. It begins with a long section that is breathlessly, can-you-top this funny, as the narrator Tom Farrell casts a gimlet eye on his snack-food and remote-control-littered bachelor hovel and invites us to laugh along with his sadly hilarious world. (A typical breakfast-after a long, Scotch-influenced night that may or may not have involved feeling sorry for himself while playing Simon and Garfunkel records-is a gallon of water and some Tylenol). He's a guy who worries that his generation-the lamest generation, the one that won no wars and launched no IPOs-will be remembered only for non-black tuxedoes, Justine Bateman and Men at Work. And his is a world where Bugs Bunny is sometimes his only friend and his occasional efforts to reach out and connect with somebody, anybody, only result in more confusion. First up is a German American paralegal, the kind who writes angry letters to the New York Times and has a habit of taking things entirely too seriously; Tom is strongly attracted to her (worrying at the same time that he could never date her because his Jewish friends would freak out), but despairs when he discovers she can't tell one Beach Boys song from the next, and has never even heard of the band's founding genius Brian Wilson. Oh well. She doesn't seem interested anyway. Moving right along. We discover after a while that Tom is, professionally speaking, a lot more successful than you'd expect. His cynical take on everything is perfectly matched to his job: he is a gifted headline writer for a jazzed-up, hype-slinging New York City tabloid (called, natch, Tabloid) where he boasts that he was the first hack to ever call Michael Jackson "wacko Jacko," and the first to call Hugh Grant (after his arrest in the company of one Divine Brown) "overblown." The characters he works with are straight out of the classic screwball comedies of the 30s such as The Front Page. There's The Toad, a slovenly editor who is secretly scheming to make it to the top, and Rollo Thrash, a permanently soused story-chaser and raconteur who phones in his writings from a bar stool. Tom cheerfully cleans up Rollo's words but his real occupation in the newsroom is swooning. That's where Julia, an aspiring ballet dancer with a lot of knowledge of books and naughty French words, comes in. Tom is driven topsy turvy by her, and from his descriptions of her you can see why: her lips, he says, are the color of the first bottle of wine you ever got drunk on. They flirt, and do a lot more than flirt, but Julia is always holding back. It takes a long, long time for Tom to discover that she has a boyfriend. Oh yeah, and they're living together. Every guy has been in that situation with a girl-just this side of madness, willing to do anything for her. For some additional, and mighty suspect, advice in girl-chasing, he turns to his playboy best friend Shooter, a hunk in dreadlocks who owns a pair of pajamas that cost more than Tom's best suit, stands to inherit a fortune from the cole slaw business and is, unsurprisingly, the object of every young lady's affections. The banter between Shooter the cool and Tom the lost provides some of the wittiest dialogue in a book that is chock-a-block with it. Some of it reminded me of David Mamet's pointed writing. A better giver of advice is Tom's other best friend, Bran Lowenstein, a ladder-climbing TV producer who alternately tells him he's a loser and kisses him savagely when she suspects his head has been turned by another girl. You're rooting for Tom and Bran to get together-each out-wisecracks the other-but you won't be surprised if they never get together, either. Some people are just too much alike. All of these characters are so well drawn, with their every quirk and flaw captured by telling details, that you can't help but think of them as based on real New York figures. And the novel as a whole is so completely true to life that you can never, as in Catcher in the Rye, predict what is going to happen to our anti-hero next. It's rare to find a comic novel, especially a first novel (or even a tenth novel, for that matter) with this much style, wit, and poise. Smith is going to have a long career.
Rating:
Summary: SKIP THIS ONE IF YOU KNOW WHAT's GOOD FOR YA, FOLKS!
Review: Love Monkey is a bad book by anyone's IMPARTIAL standards or reviews. Those who aren't objective have another agenda, but that's not for me to deal with; I'm just a big, well-read fiction luva who knows what is worthwhile. Actually you don't even need to have good taste to recognize that this novel lacks quite a lot. Not only is it one of the least amusing stories I have ever read, but the author just doesn't get you to care about the characters, because it's so clear he doesn't care for them himself. Taken entirely on its own terms, Love Monkey just doesn't hold up to a critical eye; it wobbles and crumbles into dust, as well it should.
Rating:
Summary: Literary Stink Bomb
Review: I wouldn't recommend buying this book. The only books you should buy are those which can be read over and over again. This novel is not one of those books. It leaves the reader feeling cynically amused and that's about it. If that's the kind of feeling you're looking for then by all means, buy this novel and knock yourself out. By the end of the story you will have had your fill of cheap, regurgitated humor, so much so that you won't have to read a novel like this one ever again. Because, obviously, if you've read one of these trashy books, you've read them all.
Rating:
Summary: one of the funniest novels ever
Review: I don't read that many novels-normally I stick to nonfiction--but I bought Love Monkey after reading a very impressive rave review in the San Francisco Chronicle and laughed all the way through this extremely perceptive and often enchanting book. By way of example, let me just share one brief example from the life of Smith's narrator, Tom Farrell, a guy who is crazed with love for a French-speaking, cigarette-smoking dancer he works with at a big-city tabloid paper. Says Tom, "There are advantages to girlfriendlessness: no one to monitor alcohol consumption. Breakfast cereal: not just for breakfast! Can watch midget boxing if I feel like it. Very little time wasted discussing one's deep emotional issues and picking at one's family-inflicted scar tissue.
Tom is a lovable doofus who commits one mistake after another in trying to find a girlfriend, and there's a good chance his quest will remind you of someone you know. I guess they're calling this America's High Fidelity but this book is funnier. It also has some surprising depth because the guy is so brutally honest in deconstructing his faults. I give it a big thumbs up.
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