Bright Shiny Morning (P.S.)

Interesting book. Lots of statistics about the LA area which are stunning. Frey can weave a story but oft times the lines seem a bit contrived and unbelievable. But I hung in there and finished the book!

It's obvious after Mr. Frey's first pathetic attempt at fiction (which was a true story, just not his) that his bright shiny outlook on life has been snuffed out by his miserable lot and grave depression. This novel which for some reason I had high hopes for, as the subject is delicious and would have been easy to make work brilliantly failed.
There is no story. The fragmented short stories spread through facts about the city only illustrate the author's own disillusionment.
Not everyone in LA fails, the people who work hard can and do make it. Mr. Frey, you still have a chance!

Sorry James......your endless rambling with no punctuation and bouncing back and forth between characters mixed in with history of los angeles gave me a splitting headache if you like reading this review with no punctuation or separating of ideas than you will love this book I think maybe James truly was a drug addict and maybe he relapsed while writing this i can find no other explanation for why anyone would enjoy reading an entire book in this format - I'm not kidding IT SUCKS

Put aside preconceived about James Frey and read his 510 pages of literary redemption, Bright Shiny Morning. Revel at his honest and mesmerizing look at Los Angeles, a character of the book itself. Frey offers us portraits of every corner of Los Angeles: from an actor who leads a double life, to a homeless man. The book focuses on many different lives- some we will never read about again, but this kept me interested and felt fresh. Frey’s writing is a bit choppy and unconventional, but he displays the human spirit in its worst and best states of life. On the negative side, the foul language was often repetitive and pointless. I don’t mind a few F-bombs, but this was over the top and frankly annoying. In between chapters there were facts about Los Angeles, but I kept skipping over them so I could continue reading the story.This book is definitely suited for the mature reader. Young adults are probably the primary audience for this book. Overall, I would recommend this book to the kind of readers who don’t desire constant action but rather following the life of a character and navigating the complexities of contemporary Los Angeles.

Frey weaves in and out of stories of various people in contemporary L.A., mingled with facts and statistics about the city. Even with so many characters--some that he returns to again and again and some that are met only once--I was surprised how easy it was to become immersed and follow all the different stories. The fact/stats parts went on too long at times but other than that, I really enjoyed this book.

Also--I listened to this one on audio and the reader was amazing--one of the best I've heard.

Everyone remembers the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces, James Frey's first book. Published as a memoir, it was later revealed that much of the book was fabricated to protect those Frey wrote about.

In the end, however, the controversy doesn't matter. Frey's books A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard did what all good books should do: they evoked emotion, touched long forgotten places inside of us and inspired people to live better lives.

So despite the controversy, I was excited to get my hands on Bright Shiny Morning. I wanted the book to be wonderful, breath taking, as incredible as A Million Little Pieces. Thankfully, Bright Shiny Morning is so much more than that.

Bright Shiny Morning, Frey's first work of fiction, is a novel about people living their lives in the fast paced city of L.A. It's told in James Frey's typical breath taking, beautiful prose and pulls you right in.

The book isn't an ordinary novel as can be expected with Frey's writing. Instead of a linear narrative, we are presented with a few reoccurring characters:

Dylan and Maddie, two teenagers who are madly in love. They run away to be together and find out about the darker side of life and love too soon.

Esperanza, a Mexican American, who takes a job as a maid in the house of Ms. Campbell, a woman so mean and rude that she borders on being abusive.

Amberton Parker, famous award winning actor who hides a secret so incredible that it could ruin his career if it was released.

Joe, a homeless man, who befriends a fifteen year old girl who is new to the streets and addicted to meth.

Sprinkled through out their stories are vignettes of other people, other characters who fill the city streets. As well, we learn factoids about Los Angels, about the city that serves not only as a backdrop for this novel but is essentially the largest character in the book.

James Frey has penned no mere novel. Instead he has given us one of the most intense studies of human nature. In this book is pure emotion sprawled across the page for us to read and it almost seems unseemly, looking into the characters lives as we do.

What I love most about Frey's writing is that it's real, it evokes emotion, it haunts you after you've turned the last page and closed the book. This is the true power of the written word, the ability to stay with the reader after the book is finished.

Frey has this in spades.

In Bright Shiny Morning, Frey proves that he is not only the subject of controversy. He is a writer and a true wordsmith. Bright Shiny Morning is, hands down, one of the best novels I have ever read. Ever.

If you haven't read this yet, what are you waiting for? You have no idea what you're missing.

California lures people but Los Angeles has a special glittery draw for the dreamers. This novel tells the story of those people drawn to LA and those that live, work and play there. James Frey is probably most known for his book A Million Little Pieces, which was billed as an autobiography but ended up being more of a semi-fictional memoir. I actually listened to an unabridged audio version of Bright Shiny Morning on our Lake Tahoe road trip earlier this month. The story is narrated by Ben Foster, who played Claire's boyfriend on Six Feet Under, one of my all-time favorite shows. In this book you will been a young couple (Dillon and Maddie) who head to LA to escape the Midwest. You'll also meet Esperanza, the beautiful daughter of Mexican immigrants and Amberton, the Hollywood mega-star actor who has an problem keeping his hands off his personal assistants. While these characters have the strongest threads in the novel, there are dozens of more stories of those that are lured to LA for one reason or another. Worth the read.

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING

Such a mixed bag of reviews and thoughts! I love it! This book is one of the best I have read this year. It is weird, different, enthralling, interesting, never dull. One reviewer wrote it read like a Jackie Collins novel; and yes, sometimes it did! However, I guess that would be a compliment seeing Ms. Collins is right up there on the best sellers lists constantly.

The writing is different and unique. No punctuation marks, no paragraphs, no commas, sometimes just rambling thoughts. Well, maybe more than sometimes rambling thoughts, a lot of rambling thoughts! Put all of these thoughts together and you have got yourself one good read.

This is a big, fat, juicy book. There are main characters; however, we read about them for a bit, then jump on to someone else. Some characters are never named, there is a small paragraph or two about them, and then they are never mentioned again. There is no rhyme or reasoning to the writing style, but hey -- it WORKS!!!

I loved all of the main characters; Joe the homeless drunk, Maddie and Dylan who run away from their respective abusive parents, Esperanza who works as a maid for a horrible rich woman, Amberton and Casey who are rich movie stars, and on and on. Each character brings to light their story, their dreams, their souls. The goodness of mankind. The cruelty of the human race. All of these characters were ones that interested me and ones I cared about. I could not put this book down. When I wasn't reading, I was thinking about the book. IT IS GREAT!!!

This book is LOADED with lists upon lists and facts about LA, about everything and anything you can possibly think of. I enjoyed them. The pages of facts about California's history were interesting to say the least. And I would never have dreamed that reading about the interstate highway system would be interesting and enjoyable, but it was!!!!

This book is a winner. Not for everyone, but give it a chance. If you are offended by language and subject matter, this is not for you. However, this is a book NOT to be missed. I absolutely will recommend it to all of my family and friends.

Go for it!

Thanks!
Pam

Frey can write. Multi-character narrative that follows fascinating insiders and outcasts as they attempt to negotiate life in Las Angeles. I've given this book to at least ten people and they all enjoyed it. It moves swiftly and one gets caught up in the lives of these people who are desperate, desolate and despicable. I couldn't put it down and was intrigued by which characters' lives would intersect with others. Moreover, there are the wonderful chapter interludes that chronologically depict the crackerjack/crackpot history of LA. Couldn't put this one down. Excellent.

I am shocked at some of the negative reviews written about this book. While it was not a literary masterpiece, I truly enjoyed the book and had a hard time putting it down at the end.

The characters were memorable. Esperanza the underdog. Old Man Joe who reminded me of my grandfather. Amberton who made me angry and sympathetic at the same time. Dylan and Maddie fighting for a better life. Cliches? Yes, but isn't life just a big cliche? Haven't many of us shared the same dreams and setbacks as the characters in Bright Shiny Morning?? Unlike some of the other reviewers, I enjoyed the facts about California regardless of how "Wikipedia-like" they were. I am from Michigan and had no idea that California had so much rich history.

The only thing that mildly irritated me were the breaks in the story. I had to skim a couple of times to pick up on the main characters again. Sometimes Frey talked too much about scenery and facts, and I thought he could have developed the main characters a little more.

Other reviewers often complain about Frey's lack of punctuation, grammar, and sentence stucture. Just because his style of writing is different, please don't assume he can't write a complete sentence and doesn't know how to punctuate. After all, James Joyce's "Ulysses" is taught in schools around the world and is written in what is he called a "stream of consciousness" style that closely resembles Frey's style. Frey's style of writing is exactly how our brains work, which, for me, makes it more believable. Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" was written in a style that represented the time and place of which she was writing. Not for one minute did I think that Ms. Walker was ignorant because of the way the novel was written. It made the characters more real.

Please give this novel a chance. It will not disappoint!

James Frey is a very talented writer. His style is identifiable, and some of his writing is annoying. He oftentimes writes in run on sentences. And he loves repeating phrases within a sentence to make a point. But, he knows how to write characters and how to make them completely believable.
The main characters in this book are fully developed. There are four story lines that weave their way throughout the book never intersecting. Yet in between their stories, theres about a hundred pages of information both about Los Angeles, and about the types of people who are drawn there.
Los Angeles is as much a character as any of the people. It destroys, adulates, taunts and seduces hundreds of people from all walks of life from all over the world.
I wish after he made his point about L.A., that he would have focused more on the main characters and less on random stories. Especially ones that were about nameless, generic people.
That said, I'm a fan.

James Frey's first novel suffers from the same problem as his fictional memoirs, which is that his characters are not remotely believable.

Frey's problem writing believable characters began in A Million Little Pieces. His rehab girlfriend was the standard "whore with a heart of gold" often seen in books like The Razor's Edge and Leaving Las Vegas (both of which were made into films--maybe Frey was hoping that his book would be made into a film as well).

We also met Leonard, a gay mafioso who inexplicably took a liking to Frey. A cut-rate Al Pacino character, Leonard spouted ridiculous dialogue, always calling Frey "my son."

Characters got even less believable in Frey's second book, My Friend Leonard. First, Frey's fake girlfriend commited suicide, allegedly because Frey was still incarcerated (which he never was) when her grandmother died. He turned to Leonard, who made Frey his protege (umm, because Frey was such a stable, reliable guy?) and continued to address him overly fondly as "my son" until he died as well.

Dare I mention Frey's tough-talking cellmate, Porterhouse, from the same book?

Though openly writing fiction, Frey makes the same mistake in Bright Shiny Morning.

Some characters are simply cliched, like the big-thighed Hispanic maid, the gay film star, and the black football player.

The worst character, though, is the homeless alcoholic man who only drinks Chablis. How many homeless alcoholics eschew small, potent bottles of cheap liquor in favor of toting big, low-alcohol content bottles of wine all over the beach? Frey, as always, strains all credulity just to make the man colorful.

Frey is not a bad technical writer. His sentence structure is good and he turns a decent phrase.

His characters, however, are too fake even for fiction.

The book starts out strong with descriptive, multi-story narrative. I actually didn't mind the random historical timeline build between each chapter. And while yes, the stories/characters are a bit predictable, doesn't every subjective piece of fiction contain a mixture of cliche and truth? I could even deal with the "unique" grammarical format. My main issue was the last 25-30% of the book, apparently at which point inspiration or time ran out. The stories were sloppily and abbruptly finished and random irrelevant lists of "facts" were thrown in to add pages. Mediocre read overall.

I never read "A Million Little Pieces", and I never stuck my nose into any of that scandal business a few years back. That being said, I didn't pick this novel up on any basis besides that of the concept and that reviews here on the store were mainly positive.

A few hours later, I put it down.

It didn't take me long to realize that I was reading something I'd already read multiple times before. The idea of all these stories being weaved together sounded interesting to begin with, but it didn't take long for the novelty to wear thin once I realized that nearly every plotline and character was a tired, poorly-formed cliche.

You've got the immigrant family looking for a better life in the States, only to find themselves in an even deeper mess. You've got the secretly homosexual movie star. You've got the star-crossed teenaged lovers trying to find themselves in the big city. You've got your homeless drunks, mysterious, beaten women, and old men remniscing over days long past. And while none of these devices are necessarily evil and to be entirely avoided in the writing process, they're so highly concentrated in this book that it's almost laughable.

There's also Frey's writing style. The sentences are choppy and incomplete, and there is a total lack of proper punctuation. At this point in the ballgame, this style isn't new. You've got authors like Cormac McCarthy, who write in the same kind of style, only they manage to pull it off beautifully for one reason or another. That's really not the case here. Frey's writing does not run smoothly here, and really has nothing going for it beyond creating atmosphere.

The combination of these two elements really did it in for me. I grew bored, and I stopped caring about the characters and their miserable lives. It began to grow impatient with its recycled characters and plot devices, and I just wasn't interested in reading something I'd already read. I did learn some interesting things concerning L.A.'s history, but that's about it.

What Frey did with "A Million Little Pieces" may be an issue for some, but not for me. I, simply, did not like this book.

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.

Great modern writing capturing some very possible stories in LA. It is a bit frantic . . . jumping from one story to the next, then to another and sometimes back to an existing one. Clearly I would not want all books to be written like this, but it works very well here. This is a great light read or summer read or whatever cliche you want. He is a very talented writer, which was the case in million little pieces . . . in fact, his downfall was probably his great ability to tell a story. :(

This was a fun book that honestly could have gone on for many more pages and many more stories. I do not live in LA, but I have some friends there that I visit every year (and have seen many sides, not just the tourist side) and this book seems to capture the feel of LA very well.

Bright Shiny Morning is the story of four groups of people, broken up by a lot of useless information and the beginnings of other stories that never go anywhere. The four stories include a homeless alcoholic, two teenage runaways from Ohio, a secretly gay movie star in a fake marriage (think Tom Cruise), and a Hispanic girl who works as a nanny. These stories are interesting and James Frey definitely knows how to tell a story. I was immediately dragged into two of the four. The other two I didn't care for because I didn't like the characters.

The rest of the book contains, like I said, a lot of useless information. Does anyone really want to read 20 pages of useless facts about Los Angeles? This is the kind of thing you get as a forward in your email, not spend $25 on. There are also a lot of characters introduced, but then never heard from again. I would have been interested to find out more about the gun salesman or the rape victim who purchased the gun after seeing her assailant at the fast food restaurant. Alas, not in this book.

I will say that the book was difficult to put down. I kept skipping past the useless (in my opinion) pages to get back to the main characters. It is difficult to read at times and not all of the stories have happy endings.

While not a perfect book, it does showcase Mr. Frey's talent and I hope that more is to come.

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.

Superb writing. One of the sharpest insights into the human condition I've ever read. How do you combine historical information with fictional characters? It's not only done, but done well, in this look at Los Angeles that was entertaining, informative and impossible to put down. I look forward to his next book, he gets better every time he writes something. The only thing I hated about this book is that it kept me up till dawn trying to finish it.

I am amazed after finishing this book that it has an average of 4 stars. It is one of the most disjointed books I've ever read. It is incredibly bleak. The writing style of no punctuation and run-on sentences is annoying. He tends to have pages of lists i.e gangs in L.A. by ethnic groups, veterans who have been injured in various wars, people who come to L.A. to make it big in acting and end up in a dead-end job... the lists seem endless at times. I also question his research because there are definite errors in regards to gun laws and costs at community college to name a few. AND YET there was something compelling about it to make me continue reading for 500 pages... I'm not sure what.

Unless you're looking for a rather depressing and muddled book with atrocious grammar and punctuation, I would NOT recommend this book.

Side note: I did enjoy the little blurbs of historical facts between the chapters.

A simple plan. Take 4 short story ideas, realise you dont really have enough material for novel, and fill it out with a potted history of LA, potted biographies of dimly recognisable characters (Perez Hilton anyone?) and lists of....people, some real, some not. Irritating in its simplicity, simplistic in its style. And yet even more irritatingly it works. The 4 main characters don't really bear close examination - they are more charicature than character, close to cartoons in the case of Amberton Parker. Esperanza (err...hope) is the stereotypical good girl of hard working immigrant parents, ,Old Man Joe a wino who's motivations....hey he's a wino, what motivation does he need?.....are only explored in the last few pages, Dylan and Maddie the classic teenagers on the run who's fate you can see coming for 300 pages...But as I say it works. Its gripping, engaging, and I love a list. But neither do I feel any interest in finding out any more about any of the characters / charicatures / cartoons. A briefly satisfying entertainment, unlikely to linger long. Much like a Hollywood film in fact

I suspect that with Frey's level of notoriety, he's getting treated like the very sort of untouchable celebrity he so accurately satirizes in this book: there are many points in the book where I've got to believe a lesser-known author would have been much more heavily edited. But Frey is currently a rock star in publishing circles, and while that gives his writing a fearlessness that is very compelling, his status also may be granting him an immunity to editing that I think is to his detriment.

The guy's got talent - no question about it. As much as I wanted to dislike this book, I have to give him that: the guy can freaking write. But I think his talent would shine even brighter with some editorial guidance.

For example, there are many "walk-on" characters in this book, who make one appearance and are never seen again. For the most part, they're all pretty good bits, too; unlike the LA factoids, which he ultimately begins to overuse, the walk-on bits are all pretty engaging to read. But as the book goes on, you get the sense that he's less invested in them. Early in the book, all the walk-ons have names, even if they only get a sentence or two of coverage. But later in the book they're all simply "he" or "she," as if Frey could no longer be bothered to come up with names for them.

Similarly, the LA factoids, which are a pretty effective device in the book, later on become longer and more unwieldy, interrupting the flow and slowing the pace. There's a 40-page section of this sort of thing near what should be the climax of the book that does nothing but grind the narrative to a halt. Again, this is the sort of thing an editor could help him with, without damaging his voice or the vitality of his prose.

This was an ambitious book, by somebody I can't really respect as a person, but whose writing talent I cannot impugn. And overall I enjoyed the book, and am glad I read it. I just hope Frey eventually becomes less controversial, so we can focus more on his writing and less on the brouhaha he generates. Because Frey can write. And he's trying things that are more ambitious than much of what we're seeing in currently popular books. But I think somebody needs to rein him in - just a little - before he'll rise to his full potential. I for one will be watching. And reading.

I liked 'A Million Little Pieces.' Even after I discovered that most of it was composed of lies. And I liked 'My Friend Leonard' as well. For what it was...the storytelling skill was there and they were both interesting enough to keep some momentum.
But I have to say that after looking at the overall star rating for this book, I'll never trust an the store rating again. It's disheartening to say the least that the first review listed is horrible yet it appears to have received the highest rating. If one were bold enough, one might suggest that Mr. Frey himself had written it. You know the style:
I read. I read and I read and I don't stop reading have to read. I speak. I am an intellect. I have read Faulkner, Hemmingway, I have read Camus and Sartre and all of the books their girlfriends wrote, letters, many letters and I keep reading.
Come on. Seriously.
I'll put it in very plain and simple terms why this book failed and why it does indeed read like a book that was written to fulfill a contractual obligation and nothing more. And to the zealots out there, I have nothing against Mr. Frey. I've already stated that I liked his previous efforts so back up. For real.
I honestly get the feeling that those reviewers who are swarming to defend this guy have such blind faith that they'd give 5 stars to anything Frey might scribble on the back of a cocktail napkin. Not a used cocktail napkin (he doesn't drink, you see...he's an addict. He's an addict, a criminal and a liar, by his own admission).
So anyway, this book fails on just about every level. It's like listening to stories told by a schizophrenic. And not in a good way.
Plots jump in an and out, tangled up by facts, figures, random entries, more random facts, good random facts, bad random facts...all about LA. There is no fluidity to any of the tales. It's like listening to someone with a speak impediment or a huge stutter tell a story that takes several days to tell. And by the time you hear the ending, you're so over the whole process that you care very little about the plot, the characters or the situations at all.
He thanks Ellis in the credits of the book. What Frey tried to do unsuccessfully was to capture a kind of 'Rules of Attraction' formula that just didn't work. Plain and simple.
IT DID NOT WORK in terms of literary composition. It didn't. I don't care what anyone says. I'm a reader. I read. That's what I do. Sometimes I teach from books and I teach about books and I teach and I teach.
(Sorry. Couldn't resist).
The huge downtime between the individual stories allows for the bodies to grow cold before you even have a chance to get to care about the characters at all. You're in. You're out. Two pages in, four pages in. Ten pages out. Back in.
I see what Frey was trying to do. I really do. It just didn't work. Plain and simple. I love books and I never skip pages of them, regardless of how bad they develop. I skipped all of the 'facts' pages. I skipped the random Camus journal-esque entries that had nothing to do with anything. I skipped quite a bit in fact because there simply wasn't enough there to make it interesting.
In the end, I felt had. Very had. Worse than after I learned that AMLP was fabricated.
I felt like I'd wasted several nights when I could have been reading something that I might have enjoyed. I was disappointed that Frey's first 'novel' was so confused and incoherent at times. I thought he might come out, guns blazing and prove the critics of his previous books wrong.
He didn't. Not with this effort. Not even close.
What we get (in a nutshell and without giving much away) is a Red Hot Chili Peppers 'Californication' mixed heavily with 'Hollywood Babylon.' Mix gingerly and serve chilled.
We get it. People are drawn to LA because of stars. There are a lot of drugs out there. There is a lot of sex, a lot of prostitution. A lot of broken dreams. If you are impressed or surprised by any of that, by all means pick up the book. If you liked the song, 'Californication' and thought it was deep or revealing, then by all means pick this book up.
It simply doesn't reveal anything. It simply repeats facts, tosses out random notes, reminds people that bad things are bad and bad things happen to good people in bad situations. Honestly. That's it. That's as deep and revealing as this novel gets.
I also couldn't shake the feeling that Frey has forgotten his voice since being publicly called out on AMLP. He's channeling a lot of different writers in this. He no longer has a signature feel to his writing except, of course, the run-on sentences and the exasperation that is supposed to help us feel the excitement or anxiety of his characters. And unfortunately, that's no longer enough to keep these weak plots afloat.
I particularly couldn't help but think about the film 'Magnolia' as I read through 'BSM.' If you've seen the movie and read (waded) through the book, you know what I mean.
It just doesn't work. It simply doesn't. And I'll debate anyone who thinks it does and accuse them of blindly following someone who touched them with an earlier, much better, much more successful effort in AMLP.
I read. I've read a lot of books. I read and I read and I read. I read Faulkner. I read Hemmingway. I read Camus and Sartre and all of the books that their girlfriends ever wrote. I read. I have to.
I read this book and found nothing interesting, revealing, insightful, moving or successful within in. Unfortunately. I wanted to like it. I did. I'm a reader. I read and I read an I read.
I'm never reading this again. It was a gigantic waste of time. And if this is what American literature has come to, looks like we're losing that battle along with all the other battles we've lost recently as a nation.
It just doesn't work.

I liked 'A Million Little Pieces.' Even after I discovered that most of it was composed of lies. And I liked 'My Friend Leonard' as well. For what it was...the storytelling skill was there and they were both interesting enough to keep some momentum.
But I have to say that after looking at the overall star rating for this book, I'll never trust an the store rating again. It's disheartening to say the least that the first review listed is horrible yet it appears to have received the highest rating. If one were bold enough, one might suggest that Mr. Frey himself had written it. You know the style:
I read. I read and I read and I don't stop reading have to read. I speak. I am an intellect. I have read Faulkner, Hemmingway, I have read Camus and Sartre and all of the books their girlfriends wrote, letters, many letters and I keep reading.
Come on. Seriously.
I'll put it in very plain and simple terms why this book failed and why it does indeed read like a book that was written to fulfill a contractual obligation and nothing more. And to the zealots out there, I have nothing against Mr. Frey. I've already stated that I liked his previous efforts so back up. For real.
I honestly get the feeling that those reviewers who are swarming to defend this guy have such blind faith that they'd give 5 stars to anything Frey might scribble on the back of a cocktail napkin. Not a used cocktail napkin (he doesn't drink, you see...he's an addict. He's an addict, a criminal and a liar, by his own admission).
So anyway, this book fails on just about every level. It's like listening to stories told by a schizophrenic. And not in a good way.
Plots jump in an and out, tangled up by facts, figures, random entries, more random facts, good random facts, bad random facts...all about LA. There is no fluidity to any of the tales. It's like listening to someone with a speak impediment or a huge stutter tell a story that takes several days to tell. And by the time you hear the ending, you're so over the whole process that you care very little about the plot, the characters or the situations at all.
He thanks Ellis in the credits of the book. What Frey tried to do unsuccessfully was to capture a kind of 'Rules of Attraction' formula that just didn't work. Plain and simple.
IT DID NOT WORK in terms of literary composition. It didn't. I don't care what anyone says. I'm a reader. I read. That's what I do. Sometimes I teach from books and I teach about books and I teach and I teach.
(Sorry. Couldn't resist).
The huge downtime between the individual stories allows for the bodies to grow cold before you even have a chance to get to care about the characters at all. You're in. You're out. Two pages in, four pages in. Ten pages out. Back in.
I see what Frey was trying to do. I really do. It just didn't work. Plain and simple. I love books and I never skip pages of them, regardless of how bad they develop. I skipped all of the 'facts' pages. I skipped the random Camus journal-esque entries that had nothing to do with anything. I skipped quite a bit in fact because there simply wasn't enough there to make it interesting.
In the end, I felt had. Very had. Worse than after I learned that AMLP was fabricated.
I felt like I'd wasted several nights when I could have been reading something that I might have enjoyed. I was disappointed that Frey's first 'novel' was so confused and incoherent at times. I thought he might come out, guns blazing and prove the critics of his previous books wrong.
He didn't. Not with this effort. Not even close.
What we get (in a nutshell and without giving much away) is a Red Hot Chili Peppers 'Californication' mixed heavily with 'Hollywood Babylon.' Mix gingerly and serve chilled.
We get it. People are drawn to LA because of stars. There are a lot of drugs out there. There is a lot of sex, a lot of prostitution. A lot of broken dreams. If you are impressed or surprised by any of that, by all means pick up the book. If you liked the song, 'Californication' and thought it was deep or revealing, then by all means pick this book up.
It simply doesn't reveal anything. It simply repeats facts, tosses out random notes, reminds people that bad things are bad and bad things happen to good people in bad situations. Honestly. That's it. That's as deep and revealing as this novel gets.
I also couldn't shake the feeling that Frey has forgotten his voice since being publicly called out on AMLP. He's channeling a lot of different writers in this. He no longer has a signature feel to his writing except, of course, the run-on sentences and the exasperation that is supposed to help us feel the excitement or anxiety of his characters. And unfortunately, that's no longer enough to keep these weak plots afloat.
I particularly couldn't help but think about the film 'Magnolia' as I read through 'BSM.' If you've seen the movie and read (waded) through the book, you know what I mean.
It just doesn't work. It simply doesn't. And I'll debate anyone who thinks it does and accuse them of blindly following someone who touched them with an earlier, much better, much more successful effort in AMLP.
I read. I've read a lot of books. I read and I read and I read. I read Faulkner. I read Hemmingway. I read Camus and Sartre and all of the books that their girlfriends ever wrote. I read. I have to.
I read this book and found nothing interesting, revealing, insightful, moving or successful within in. Unfortunately. I wanted to like it. I did. I'm a reader. I read and I read an I read.
I'm never reading this again. It was a gigantic waste of time. And if this is what American literature has come to, looks like we're losing that battle along with all the other battles we've lost recently as a nation.
It just doesn't work.

This book is like a Jackie Collins novel. A little dose of suspense, thin characters, really awful dialogue, and lots & lots of cliched stereotypes. The story line about the famous couple is the absolute worst. Honest to god, it's PURE Jackie Collins. To be fair, I'm only 3/4 of the way through, but I'm guessing it doesn't get much better. I liked his first book (can't remember the name) and couldn't give a rats bum that it was made up. Good writing is good writing in my opinion. But this book....ugh, this book is really bad. Also, I live in LA, and his portrait of the city is ridiculous. Some of it is true (his description of the traffic & freeways and struggling actors are particularly accurate), but most of it so exaggerated and some of it is just downright inaccurate. The only good thing about the book is the cover art. I thought it was lovely.

The author was successful in involving my emotions; I cared about the main characters and made time in my day to get back to the book to find out what happened to them.

Now that I've finished, it is easily a book to donate to someone else for light reading. Frey has a style, which I believe worked in this novel - spare, and jolting - disconnected - it aided the portrayal of the bleak hopelessness which is certainly a part of life in Los Angeles for many.

The book is a bummer. That seems to be the author's intent, though, and I did want to turn the pages - I just didn't care when they ran out.

That is the first sentence one encounters when you open Bright Shiny Morning. That got a huge laugh out of me. That a boy, Frey!
This time just say nothing is true. Not one iota, Rien!

I started reading with a smile on my face that stayed through all 501 pages. If we need to start saving paper because we are running out of trees, get rid of the FUN FACTS pages-those were inane.They seemed like they were page fillers.

I am giving this book 5 stars, howver, because you can skip those fun facts and it will have no impact on your enjoyment of the book.
This book brought me back to the early days of Joyce Carol Oates. Frey can
really get inside of a huge range of characters. I loved each and everyone and loved the format of the book- a different character at every chapter. And then those characters come back through out the book.

I moved to LA right after college many years ago and all of those chacters were there-I just didn't get to meet them all. In this book, I found them.They are timeless.

I love the movie star family-why was I thinking of Tom Cruise whenever those chapters came up?
I loved the couple from the midwest and I loved Esperanza.

This was a book you want to keep going.This book had more truth than the last.
Movie-anyone?

This is an amazing book about people (Angelenos) and a place (Los Angeles) that I have not given much thought to before now. What a history Los Angeles has. What a diverse population James writes about in this unusual novel. I learned so much about the residents of LA and people, in general, from this book, their thoughts, intentions and motives. All, just people, looking for love, in one way or another. James Frey writes an incredible book that had me reading far into the night, fascinated by this interesting trip to LA and all it's madness.

Frey has developed a writing style that mimics the way the millennium brain process information. Think it's easy to do? Check out Janet Maslin's May 12 New York Times review of this book, which tries to be cute by imitating Frey's style but ends up reading like badly translated Russian song lyrics. In the tradition of Woolf, Stein and Kerouac, Frey brings us a up-to-the-minute voice that reflects this high definition dominated, Myspace conquered, interactive experience called the twenty first century. The language is sparse yet beautiful. The stories are compelling. Frey resists tying the sub plots together in some unlikely and contrived plot twist at the climax of the novel and instead allows the city to be the only link between these varied characters. The 501 pages go by quickly because the writing pushes you forward. The four parallel stories create a tension that compels you to turn the page, to say to your self, "just one more chapter" until finally you look up and realize your lunch hour was over fifty minutes ago. This is a really good novel that does what the best fiction should do - entertains, takes you away, encourages you to think.
P.S. The Amberton sub plot is especially enjoyable if you envision Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in the title roles. Of course, this is a work of fiction, so the characters are absolutely, totally, 100% not based on them but ...

Wonderful!! I could not put it down...I must admit I have been looking for a new book from James Frey, since A million little pieces, and My friend Leonard... I still am fascinated with his quirky way of writing...but it works!! A great cast of charactors from all walks of life...and interesting bits of L.A. history inbetween the chapters...I am already looking for his next book. Some how James pulls you into his charactors lives in amazing ways, that leaves you thinking about them after the book is long finished...A great read James...Thankyou ...Sincerely Janet McHugh

James Frey can flat out write. No doubt about that. Bright Shiny Morning is a page turner. That said, I found it difficult to get past the cliched characters for whom I found little compassion or empathy. The factoid riffs went on too long and the repetitive "Fun, fun, fun, fun fun" declarations announcing a run of facts became quickly annoying. Even with stock characters and purported facts about LA to help create the framework for the city, what emerges from Frey's presentation of Los Angeles is as cliched as its characters: a place that is over-crowded, freeway dominated, gang infested, shallow, show-biz infatuated, multi-ethnic, and a mecca for lost souls. While these observations may be true, at least to some degree, there is no new insight or new presentation of these viewpoints but rather a repeating of age-old criticisms from LA bashers dating back at least six decades. The book is worth reading for Frey's considerable way with words but it has little else to recommend it.

I couldn't care less that Frey's controversial book, "A Million Little Pieces" took the book reading fan club by storm. This drama just created an eagerness for me to openly support him anyway. In fact his embellishments in telling his story were just what made me run out to be one of the first in my circle to read his new book. If you're upset about Frey's past, get over it - and don't go to any 12 Step meetings; you'll be shocked! Frey's ability to sort out the absurd and poignant at the same time is really quite masterful. Here are the buts: I could have easily and more happily done without the use of foul language. Frey's use of colorful speech is thoroughly unnecessary and shows a lack of creativity while poorly filling in precious space that could have been used to further expand on the main characters. Frey's too good of a storyteller to stoop this low. Also, I find myself holding my breath to finish a sentence as they all tend to run together without punctuation. I can't hold my breath that long!

I am wondering if all the bad punctuation and grammar were done on purpose and was it Frey's doing or the editor? In any case, that detracts hugely from an otherwise surprisingly good book. If, and it's a giant if, you can look past the poor structure, the book is pretty good. I say that having no bias for or against Frey since I've read none of his other controversial works. I wouldn't tell you to purchase this book, but see if your library has it. The sections and stories are not "intertwined" and in this book's case, that's a GOOD thing.

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.

When first reading this book I was really skeptical, I am a huge James Frey fan just from reading A Million Little Pieces. I went to my local library in search for some of his books. I tend to read books then buy them. I have been reading for two days and find myself smiling, crying, laughing, and getting angry with the characters. Yes, when it comes to the actual stories he is telling they are usually, very predictable. That is one of the reasons I like this book. James, tells us his opinion on LA, and I can't help but agree with him 100%. I am one of those people who will NEVER step foot in LA, just because to me, it is over rated. I feel as if, we share the same opinions on everything about this city. I love his humor he uses, especially on the Fun Facts About LA. I love everything about this book and I will be purchasing it the next time I go into Half Price Books :)

i have long waited for james new book after reading his 'memoir' the million pieces and leonard book. it's a very different thing but i still like it
it's about LA, i can see there are lots of research and ground work done
but...it's the message it's bringing out touches me still
colors, races, dreams, destruction, lust, obsession, love, abuse, violence...which cities do not have these elements, but LA seeems to have an exagerrating amount of these adding all up
james bring it to our attention and in a very vivid way
he is so good at bringing us VIVID pictures through words

i want to read his 4th books

I never got caught up in the uproar surrounding James Frey's Oprah pick, A MILLION LITTLE PIECES. I sat from afar, shaking my head thinking, "This guy jerked the wrong person and got caught. We'll never hear from him again." In the fallout, I do admit to being curious about the memoir, more from the standpoint of a rubbernecker with that unexplainable penchant to view a horrendous car wreck on the freeway, but I told myself I was an author, and authors don't support authors like Frey. I passed the crash, kept on driving. So when I came across a review in PEOPLE on Frey's newest, BRIGHT SHINY MORNING, I only took a cursory glance. So I guess Literary Land does give a guy a second chance. Frey's latest endeavor: fiction. Perhaps it was still that need to view the collision that I scanned the review. Two words caught my attention: Los Angeles. I was hooked.

I was born and raised in L.A. county. While I've now lived in Idaho for 18 years, L.A. formed who I was/am today. L.A. is its own character on the map, a city that is . . . well, captured so well in Frey's book, I'm nearly at a loss on how to review it. At the risk of sounding like a completely smitten fan, there's really no other way for me to say it: BRIGHT SHINY MORNING is, to me, a literary feast.

Some may be turned off from the start with the rambling vignettes, the narrative, the run on sentences, the lack of punctuation. Almost like a new eyeglass prescription, the reader has to adjust to the style of the book, but once one learns to read each word independently, they fall into place. Frey omits the traditional format and doesn't indent anything. Doesn't use dialogue quotes, almost writes in a meandering manner that defies the publishing system. Ironic . . .

What sucked me in, were the historical facts of Los Angeles. These small pieces of information start the beginning of each chapter--which really aren't chapters, as there is no chapter numbers on anything. You simply move from scene to scene, much like a piece of trash floating on the Santa Anas, stopping here and there, to tell a story. One story. One hundred stories. One thousand stories. Of the millions of people who live in L.A. From the rich, to the poor, to the homeless, to the immigrants, to actors, musicians, the porn stars. Out of all the character vignettes, I probably got the biggest chuckle over the adult film industry folks. I was raised in Chatsworth, in the San Fernando Valley; graduated from Chatsworth High with Val Kilmer and Kevin Spacey. 90% of all porn is filmed in the Valley--most in Chatsworth. Don't ask me why. It just is.

Many of the historical facts captured my interest, an earthquake I lived through, a fire. The passage on the L.A. freeways, the ones I learned to drive on in drivers training . . . classic. I smiled with fond memories at the network of arteries that are the pulse of L.A. You need them, you curse them, they are the only way to get from Point A to Point B. When I moved to Idaho, I'd ask, "How long does it take to get there on the freeway?" The answer would be, "It's five miles." I'd shake my head, "No, you don't get it--how long? Like an hour, or what?" I was gazed at as if I were dense. In L.A., it might take you an hour to travel one mile on the Santa Monica in rush hour.

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING, while meandering in its characters, the majority we never see again, does follow a loose structure of four main players. There's Dylan and Maddie, nineteen, running to L.A. in the hopes of finding their dream life. I was touched the most by these characters, and hoping they would succeed in a city that can make or break you. I felt for them, I knew where they were in the Valley, and I'd pushed my daughter in a baby carriage through the Westside Pavilion, the area where Maddie found her "dream" apartment. Then there's Esperanza, a Mexican-American girl, whose dream it was for her parents to give her a better life. Her story follows her growing up in East L.A., the struggles of the family, the vow her father makes to protect her. And Amberton Parker, the movie actor who is gorgeous, married, has kids, but leads a secret life. His story is pathetically narcissistic, and most likely, all too true. Old Man Joe, homeless, lives in the bathroom at Venice Beach. He's drawn so vividly, I think I know him. Seen him there many times when riding my bike on the boardwalk.

While this novel may not hold the same appeal to someone who didn't call Los Angeles home, it's worth reading for the cast of characters, people we know, don't want to know, wish we knew. It's a daily struggle of life, trying to blend, mesh, meld, tolerate, love . . . hate. BRIGHT SHINY MORNING was a journey home for me, almost a maudlin reflection of where I'd been for the first thirty-three years of my life. There were times I read and I grew homesick. Other times, I thanked God I don't live in that smog-pit anymore. Whatever the case, the novel captured my attention, and dare I admit it, made me a fan of Frey.

Bright Shiny Morning is a chaotic snapshot of L.A. It's like a music video but without the music or the video. Fictional vignettes, sometimes entertaining though more often predictable and trite, are jumbled with more mundane elements like lists of `fun facts' about L.A., descriptions of highways, historical events, and other minutiae. The book goes something like this: vignette about two in-love teenagers coming to L.A. to escape their abusive parents--cut to a list of the names of all the gangs in L.A.--cut to a one-page snippet about an aspiring actress promised a job in exchange for sex--cut to a three-sentence description of L.A. bank robberies in 1895--cut to a vignette about a self-absorbed movie superstar and his problems with his boyfriends--cut to a dull recitation of all the natural disasters that have ever hit L.A. In Bright Shiny Morning, nothing is sustained and nothing lasts. At times, Frey's quick-paced prose is a refreshing break from the more mundane aspects of this novel, but he indulges too often in repetition. A couple typical examples:

The children thought she was crazy, they were all still scared of him. He seemed bigger every day. He was bigger every day.

Every night before he went to sleep he lay in bed and dreamed, lay in bed and dreamed.

I suspect Frey is trying to add a certain weightiness with this repetition, but I found it to be an annoying affectation, especially after seeing it on almost every page. Although Frey succeeds in capturing the frenetic and ephemeral aspects of modern L.A., I was left feeling this is a 500-page book with nothing in it that's real or important.

What a book. California dreams, nightmares and realities. Fascinating, enthralling and educational. Story of people drawn to Los Angeles. Who they are, where they come from, what they want and get. Story of today and the world we live in. The cruelty and kindness. Once you get going, you do not want to put this book down and will never again think of LA in the same way.

I wasn't really bothered when James Frey's "Million Little Pieces" was revealed as fraud. I loved the book and I loved the story because I love being entertained. Don't stop reading; I'm not THAT simple. I knew he would emerge as a fantastic writer, it was just a matter of when. I love his brave noconformist approach to standard English conventions. (I am an English teacher!) "Bright Shiney Morning" was a breath of fresh air to read and I really can't explain why. I loved it and had a hard time putting it down; every time it was time for me to read I jubilantly jumped in. If you are reading this reivew, you have probably already read plot summaries, so I really don't need to go into that. I loved this book. Just read it and you won't be disappointed.

Once I got past the odd format of no punctuation, run-on sentences, and the strange paragraph arrangement, I was enthralled. This is one of the best pieces of fiction in quite a while. I read an average of two books a week, so calling it extraordinary is high praise when it's in competition so with many others. I highly recommend this book if you enjoy crisp characters and a compelling story line.

I absolutely love this book, I cannot put it down. James Frey has created characters so real you feel they're part of your life. Having lived in LA - particularly Venice - for 6 years, this book comes alive for me; so realistic is his description of the city and its inhabitants I could swear I can smell every alley way, every fast food place, motel room and every traffic jam he writes about. I am amazed by the way James was able to capture the feeling of the city, something I would only expect from someone who has lived here many years, which from my understanding he has not.

I got used to his writing style very easily, sometimes it seems he writes exactly the way my brain wants to process the words and sentences. I just absorb page by page.

I also loved "A Million Little Pieces" because I could 100% relate to the subject matter, same as with this book. I really don't care much about the drama that followed his first book.

What really bothers me though is that people are using these book reviews as a forum to bash the author without even having read a word of Bright Shiny Morning and that these so-called reviews are reflected in the average rating stars the book got. If you only look at the reviews from people that actually read the book it seems that the overall rating would be much higher. I wonder what would have happened if he had written this book under an alias...

In his most recent literary work, Frey offers a surprising mixture of fictional and historical shots of Bright Shiny LA. His idea of covering the formation of the city from its early days and providing facts about its current state as a background to the fictional lives of a dozen characters is beautifully original. But it is over-celebrated in long passages, and poorly integrated into the novel. Mostly, the facts are evidently introduced in order to give credibility to a series of characters and stories that are all equally stereotypical. Frey might have better served the literary genre by zooming in on the lives of actual Angelenos who, although they participate in the statistics, do not impersonate them. As it stands, the novel offers page after page of shallow characters and cliché story-lines and dialogues. The book appears to reflect the author's own preconceptions more than it offers an occasion to mind-travel among the streets and people of Los Angeles.

This book was bought primarily because I felt bad about the crucifiction he faced with dignity on Oprah and I wanted to be supportive. I had not read any of his other works and was amazed at the raw soaring talent displayed within this book. I was enthralled from the first word to the last. Frey is an amazing writer and I will now buy everything he writes with eager anticipation..much like Poe, the reader knows without a doubt, that the writer has lived his story in some fashion, to make it so true to those who have and have not been there. In that equality lies the miracle. Mary W. Black, Flagstaff, AZ