Book Review and Giveaway: The Guys' Guy's Guide to Love

By Gail Allison

**Giveaway is now closed**

What do you get when you mix Mad Men with Sex and the City? The answer, of course, is Robert Manni’s "The Guys’ Guy’s Guide To Love." The book’s title is taken from the name of a column that one of the main character agrees to pen for a women’s magazine, with interesting results.

Max Hallyday is an ad man. A good one. And he feels like he’s wasting his talents working at a mom-and-pop ad agency. His girlfriend Veronica, an advertising executive who is incredibly self-motivated, pushes him to push himself more. When the opportunity arises for him to jump ship from the family-friendly outfit he’s become comfortable with into the shark-infested waters of a high-powered, cutthroat agency, Max takes the leap, hoping that Veronica will approve. Unfortunately for Max and Veronica’s relationship, having to make a name for himself at a new agency means more hours spent romancing clients than his girlfriend, and unfortunately someone as high-maintenance as Veronica does not stand for that kind of treatment.

Meanwhile, we meet Max’s friend Roger: another adman, and a classic womanizer. Roger has two online dating profiles: one is the classic bad boy, and the other is a sensitive, caring gentleman. He picks and chooses the women he’s most interested in and plays them for what they’re worth, discarding them after he’s finished. Max has always observed Roger’s behavior in a cool, detached way, but when his friend Cassidy asks him to pen a column for her women’s magazine that’s just launching, he starts looking at Roger with a more critical eye.

Roger becomes the center of Max’s column for My Radiance magazine: "The Guys’ Guy’s Guide to Love." As Max details Roger’s exploits (anonymously of course), he gains more and more popularity, and ultimately risks losing himself to the same game that Roger has become so practiced at.

"The Guys’ Guy’s Guide to Love" is an easy read. It gives us an insider’s view of the world of advertising in New York (the author Robert Manni is President of advertising agency Agent16 in midtown Manhattan) while exploring the different relationships that men and women can have. The only gripe I had about this book was realism: maybe in New York everyone looks like a supermodel, but that just didn’t strike me as something that would actually happen. About midway through the book I put it down and wondered why every woman that Max seemed to know was “willowy” and “gorgeous”.

Other than that, I enjoyed "The Guys’ Guy’s Guide to Love" quite a bit. I found the author’s use of putting Max’s actual columns into the book a nice touch, plus it was a nice break within the novel. It was like putting the book down and reading a magazine without having to put the book down! The storyline definitely drew me in and kept me wanting to read more, and I really found using the environment of advertising agencies to be a great backdrop for the unfolding storyline. I’d like to commend  Mr. Manni on his ability to write what he knows…it really shone through in this book and made it come to life off the page quite nicely. The ending really took care of every loose end, and tied it all together nicely. If you have a spare weekend, pick this one up. It’s a lot of fun.

Thanks to Robert Manni, we have one copy of "The Guys' Guy's Guide to Love" to give to a lucky reader in the US or Canada.

How to win "The Guys' Guy's Guide to Love": Please tell us: If you were to write a column for a magazine of the opposite gender, what would you talk about? Please include an e-mail address or another way to contact you if you win. One entry per person.

US/Canada only. Ends February 1st at midnight EST.

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