Bright Shiny Morning
by James Frey
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Book Reviews of Bright Shiny Morning
Book Review: Stunning portrait of Los Angeles
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: From fraud to plagarist.....
Summary: 1 Stars
Most reputable authors, even when writing fiction, include a list of "Suggested Books to Read", fiction's answer to a bibliography when one isn't given, as it should be in this case.
He so obviously got more than 75% of this book from other sources that I can't believe HarperCollins thought it was permissable to cover their butts by putting on the copywright page "This is a work of fiction. References to real people and locations are used fictionally. All other names, characters, and places, and all dialogues and events, are the product of the author's imagination." Oh, please.
And the mind-numbing minutae! Any English teacher would cross out 20% of the book with a red pen and mark 'filler' in the margin. Pages of names of people treated in the VA, people who are working other jobs when they want to be an actor/actress, etc. Most of the vignettes are like 'the people game'-look at a stranger and make up a story about them.
The few main characters that appeared throughout the book were never woven together, except they all lived in L.A.
He wrote about 120 pages of a 486 page book. Hopefully the authors listed on his top 10 (12 to be pretentious) list here at Amazon are reading his book and filing lawsuits.
Book Review: Good, but not that good.
Summary: 3 Stars
First off I should say that I actually like James Frey as an author. A fiction author, that is. With Bright Shiny Morning he tells you in the beginning of the book that nothing in it is true, then proceeds to tell you the stories of four characters: Amberton, a movie star who's secretly gay, Esperanza, a young Mexican American woman who works for a dreadful old lady, Joe, a drunk who tries to save a meth-addicted girl, and Dylan and Maddie, a couple that leave their small town to try to start a new life in LA. Interspersed throughout the book are also various vignettes about dozens of different people and lives in LA, as well as facts about the city itself. While the book is ambitious and wide in its scope, the stories themselves are too cliche to be interesting after the first 300 pages. During most of the book I found myself asking "How many times have I seen these kinds of stories in print before?" Toward the end of the book I literally found myself skipping over much of it, as the facts and vignettes had ceased to hold any interest for me. All in all, the book is far too broad and could have been scaled back by about 200 pages. I'd be interested in Frey's future writing projects, but this book just really didn't do it for me. I'll probably sell this one on Ebay.Book Review: A page turner in need of an editor.
Summary: 4 Stars
I succumbed to Maslin's breathless review and ordered my copy a few days ago. Though the book isn't quite worthy of her rave, it's still an entertaining collection of serialized stories--I began in the afternoon and didn't stop until I finished early the next morning.
That said, there are many poorly considered style elements that keep the book from carrying any serious weight, and I don't mean Frey's punctuation or random lists of facts. Having not read his other work, I don't know if this is always the case, but he "dumbs things down" to a ridiculous degree. For instance, he gives parenthetical definitions of many words some readers may not know (e.g. vicuna). This is what dictionaries are for. He also makes frequent errors like describing a celebrity's suit as "custom-made" instead of "bespoke". Though these may not seem worth mentioning, when they appear on nearly every page the result can be infuriating. They kept me from taking the social commentary seriously (unlike, say, Bonfire of the Vanities).
Despite these caveats, if you're like me and haven't had a good read for a while, this will probably do it for you. Just don't let the Times' review inflate your expectations.
Book Review: Not a scorned reader...
Summary: 4 Stars
Despite feeling duped the first time around by Mr. Frey, I'm not a scorned reader and had a go at "Bright Shiny Morning". I tore through this book just as fast as everyone else did who was able to review it so quickly following it's release, so make no mistake people, we do have a page turner here.
While I recognize the main character as being LA herself, I didn't care about her. I was more interested in the 4 supporting stories. I was so caught in the grips of those stories that I actually found everything else in the book to be a distraction, the facts, the traffic, the gangs, the highways, etc...
Every chapter relating to the 4 main stories end in a mini cliffhanger The irregularity of this book left me eager and impatiently wanting more! There is no rhythm or flow, it seems random and scattered, and kept me moving forward to see if these stories were revisited.
We are introduced to so many different people and situations during the first half of the book I thought the author was suffering from ADD. In my opinion, any single one of the dozens we meet could be an independent stand-alone story that I would a happily indulge in.