Girl Meets Ape

Girl Meets Ape (2004) – Chris Manby
Coronet Books • ISBN: 0340828064 • Condition: Good
Rom-com, workplace chaos, and one extremely inconvenient primate, from Crappy Old Books

Boy meets girl is over.
We have upgraded to: Girl Meets Ape.

Welcome to the early-2000s, where:

• Your job is morally “grey area” at best

• Your love life is a shambles

• And your most meaningful relationship might just be with a large, charismatic animal who can’t actually talk back… but still somehow judges you.

In Girl Meets Ape, Chris Manby takes the standard romantic-comedy toolkit – cute guy, career angst, emotional confusion – and hurls a great big ape straight through the middle of it. Because nothing says “I’m reassessing my life choices” like being upstaged by a primate.

So what’s the damage?

Our heroine (ambitious, frazzled, not entirely sorted):

• Has a job that pays the rent but may or may not be ethically spotless

• Is trying to be professional, successful, and well-behaved

• Is also trying to have a love life, which is frankly more slapstick than sophisticated

Enter:

• Ape (actual, not metaphorical) – photogenic, expressive, and better at getting sympathy than most humans

• A man who cares more about the ape than he does about quarterly results – rude, obviously, but also annoyingly attractive

• A PR disaster / campaign / cause that tangles animal rights, media spin, romance, and the awkward question:

  “Are you a good person, or just a person with good hair and a job title?”

Cue:

• Protests, awkward TV appearances, costume mishaps

• PR spins that absolutely do not go to plan

• Several moments where our heroine must choose between:

  • Impressing the boss

  • Impressing the hot activist

  • Or not being a terrible human being

It’s messy, funny, a bit ridiculous, and exactly the sort of story where a romantic turning point can occur while someone is holding a banana and saying something they immediately regret.

Rom-com, but with extra fur

Expect all the classics:

• Will-they-won’t-they vibes

• Best friends with opinions

• Exes, rivals, and people who definitely own more suits than scruples

Plus:

• Ethical dilemmas involving lab tests, zoos, campaigns, or conservation (depending on how much trouble Manby decided to cause)

• Media mayhem: press events, photo ops, spin-doctoring, and the universal truth that animals will always behave badly in front of cameras

• A heroine slowly realising that “success” might need a new definition that doesn’t involve selling her soul and ignoring the monkey

It’s very much a 2000s rom-com paperback: breezy, sharp, a bit chaotic, and ideal for reading in the bath or on a train while avoiding eye contact.

Condition: Good (unlike the heroine’s life choices)

When Crappy Old Books says Good, we mean:

• The cover is intact and presentable – maybe a light scuff or two, but still perfectly ready for Instagram (if you’re into that sort of thing).

• The spine is solid, perhaps with a faint reading crease – evidence it has been opened by at least one person snort-laughing at the wrong moment.

• All pages are present and firmly attached – no missing declaration of love, no lost punchline, no vanishing scene with the ape stealing the show.

• Mild, honest wear: softening at the corners, gentle page toning, maybe the whisper of a previous reader who needed a bit of escapism and got exactly that.

No mystery stains, no pages fluttering out like dramatic exits, no coffee tsunami across the climactic chapter. Just a straight-up Good condition book with plenty of rom-com mileage left.

Why you might actually want this

Ideal if you:

• Love your romantic comedies with a side order of absurdity

• Have a soft spot for workplace fiction where the job is almost the villain

• Enjoy watching a heroine trip, flail, protest, deny her feelings, then slowly get her act together

• Appreciate a story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, even when it’s poking at big topics (ethics! image! what we do for money!)

Also great as:

• A palate-cleanser between heavier, more “worthy” books

• A throw-in-your-bag read for journeys, holidays, or “I cannot face my inbox tonight” evenings

• A gift for that one friend who knows in their heart they’d probably fall for the animal-rights guy and feel bad about their shoes

The slightly hairy facts

• Title: Girl Meets Ape

• Author: Chris Manby

• Publisher: Coronet Books (2004)

• ISBN: 0340828064

• Condition: Good – lightly worn, fully intact, emotionally chaotic in all the right ways

Girl Meets Ape: for when you want a rom-com that asks, “What if your love life, career, and conscience all collided… and there was an ape watching?” Supplied in honestly Good condition by Crappy Old Books, who can’t sort out your ethics, but can at least keep you entertained while you think about them.

Keep browsing: See more Womens books Other books by Chris Manby