Claude Romig 2008-11-12

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

I hate this book. I don't say this very often. I've read thousands of books in my life, from Burgess to Bradbury, from Starship Troopers to The Sun Also Rises. But I have never had cause to hate a book before. I truly despised Bright Shiny Morning. The feeling it left me with was disjointed despair. Imagine you are a kid in a classroom. The teacher asks you a question. You give the wrong answer. She smacks you on the head with a wooden ruler. You are asked another question. You're right this time. She smacks you on the head with the ruler. She doesn't smack you after every answer. She doesn't even smack you every time you are wrong. She is totally inconsistent with her punishments and it never ends until the school year ends.

This is what Bright Shiny Morning is like. Undeserved, unending punishment. Disjointed inconsistency. Brutal. And it continues until the very end.

Do the human race a favor. Buy the book, but please, buy it used. And then burn it.

Jessi McKinney 2008-11-09

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

While maybe not 5-star material (it didn't change my life, give me a new perspective, or make me think about it for weeks after I finished) I found the novel entertaining. But more than that, it felt REAL to me. People can moan on and on again about cliches, but really, the reason they are cliches is because these things really happen! How many of us, if we can categorize ourselves in a few sentences would turn out sounding "cliche"?

I think there are three main categories of people that don't like this book.

One group still feels lied to and "cheated" after it came out that James Frey's first book wasn't 100% factual (but then again also, how many memoirs are? Everything is skewed through someone's bias, it just so happened that there was evidence against some of what he claimed was his life.) These people will never like another thing James Frey writes, not even if its the next Great American Masterpiece.

The second group is angry that Frey presumes to know THEIR city more than they do. They go through the book saying, "Ha! This could never happen! and This description is off!" They just come off sounding elitist and petty.

The last is the group of people that call out "CLICHE!" all the time. The things that happen to these people actually occur, and they happen enough so that it is well recognized. The trouble is making these stories and people three-dimensional and I feel that the cliche-shouters can't look past their discovery of cliches to see if there is actually any dimension beyond that.

You kind of have to weed through those reviews to find the ones that aren't quite so biased. I can't claim that mine isn't, I am human after all, and opinions still are just opinions. However, I found the novel engrossing and the facts interesting, although they did stop the flow of the narratives from time to time. Mainly because the jokey, "hanging out with your buddies" language was disparate with the language of the rest of the novel. But when it comes right down to it, I was interested in the lives of the people and I wanted them to succeed and be happy. I wanted to see what was going to happen to them, and to me, that is what makes a good book.

L. Abel 2008-10-23

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Simply put, I loved this book. It is a compulsive read that will hook you from page one. It is less a novel than a group of vignettes portraying the lives of several vastly different Los Angeles citizens. The main characters include a closeted-actor whose life is a lie, a young couple fleeing life in the Mid-west only to find that LA might not be the city of dreams they thought it would be, a homeless man struggling with an alcohol addiction, and a Hispanic cleaning lady who dreams of a better future. On the surface they seem like stereotypical LA characters, but the depth and realness that James Fray gives them makes the reader care to know their fate. Interspersed throughout the vignettes is a brief history of Los Angeles, beginning to present. The history serves as an ironic insight into the present state of affairs of LA. There are also chapters like, Fun Facts About LA!!!, that include all sorts of interesting tidbits of information on the city--from the macabre to the bizarre.

Bright Shiny Morning is a fascinating, gritty, and all together beautiful portrait of life in Los Angeles. I laughed, I cried, and I cursed. But most of all, I walked away feeling that I better understood the city of LA and the various people that live there. I will never walk the streets of Los Angeles quite the same way.

David Arsement 2008-10-22

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

I just read the last few pages (almost 500) of James Frey's newest book, 'Bright Shiny Morning', and I can't figure out what to say, or if words are even enough.



Never has a book, since 'The Perks of Being A Wallflower', have I been so incredibly moved by a novel. It's novels like these that tear your heart in half and sew it back together.

This novel has broken me in half. Reading it, I went through the most happiest of times, to the deepest sadness, to actually being afraid, to feeling sick, to feeling every possible feeling. I carried this book with me to work and I work at Wal-Mart, and I always take my breaks at the McDonalds there, and there people would stare at me because I would be reading and making these facial expressions, sad, happy, sometimes I would read something so funny (Especially when you meet the guy named 'Lemonade'... hahaha...) that I would start burst out laughing.

It looks huge, but the lines are double spaced and the pages just fly. Sometimes though, I was so afraid to find out what was going to happen (because reading Frey's novels, you quickly learn to understand you can never know what to expect...) that I would actually find myself re-reading the same stupid sentence over and over cuz I was so afraid! Lmao! I'm dead serious.

Also, the way Frey writes is beautiful. It's the worst writing ever, lol, he writes like a photographer would, in a wierd way, he takes snap shots of thoughts and prints them, not caring if they look funny without commas or periods or bunched up, and it takes a while to get used to it, unless you read his other books.

There's one part where I found myself reading ten pages of the most boring thing in the world, about highways, but the chapter after that was so incredibly amazing and it all connected with the previous ten pages arggggh I wish I could just read it to you.

This book follows four main narritives, it has the story of a bum who wants to help a poor drug addicted girl, a spanish girl who hates herself, a gay celebrity that hides this fact from the world, and best of all, Dylan and Maddie, a teenage couple who ran away from a bunch of horror to be in love with each other, who I now am incredibly in love with.

I don't know if you read his first novel 'A Million Little Pieces', but forget about all the bad publicity. He wrote a memoir and threw a bunch of crap in it to make it have a better moral, a moral of hope, and he had no idea that he was going to be famous, he didn't want a huge scandal. (I, as an artist, understand this.) Even if you think what he did was unfair, forgive him, and please please read this novel. Lol you will thank me for suggesting it, I swear it. I read, typically, about 2-3 novels every month, and this is the first novel in a long time (three years) that actually made me cry at the end, in a happy way, in a sad way, in a wonderful way.

Oh, and I'm moving to L.A. now. Lol. Who's with me? Thanks James for infecting me with your L.A. dream thing lol.

I give 'Bright Shiny Morning' a 6 out of 5 stars. :)

M. Henson 2008-10-21

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

This is honestly, 100% the best book I have ever read! There isnt one thing about it that I would change because it all worked together to even out the book and make it unforgetable... Rarely a book comes along that sticks in your head and you can never get it out... this book was that for me... It was so well written, in a high school creative writing project kind of way... It really made me feel like i understood the inner workings of LA... I finished the book several months ago and it is still stuck in my head! I didnt read "A million little pieces" or any of his other books before this one, I had no opinions of the author before this book. I honestly reccomend reading it. It dose have some rough spots, it gets a little graffic just be ready for that... but, honestly... incredibible book!!!! READ IT!