Dozens of characters pass across the reader's sight lines—some never to be seen again—but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA's lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives: a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American woman who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation; a supremely narcissistic action-movie star whose passion for the unattainable object of his affection nearly destroys him; a couple, both nineteen years old, who flee their suffocating hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the great city; and an aging Venice Beach alcoholic whose life is turned upside down when a meth-addled teenage girl shows up half-dead outside the restroom he calls home.
BOOK REVIEWS
Media Reviews
"I expect, given the sharpness of the knives that some critics have out for Frey, that many will say the book flat out doesn't work ... Yet the guy has something: an energy, a drive, a relentlessness, maybe, that can pull readers along, past the voice, past the stock characters, past the clichés. Bright Shiny Morning is a train wreck of a novel, but it's un-put-downable, a real page-turner - in what may come to be known as the Frey tradition." - Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly.
"As it stands, Morning is like L.A. at its worst: undone by ambition, sprawl, and (verbal) smog. Not to mention a glib resistance to hard work. D+" - Entertainment Weekly.
"The million little pieces guy was called James Frey. He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time." - New York Times, Janet Maslin.
"Bright Shiny Morning is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read. But you have to give James Frey credit for one thing: He's got chutzpah." - Los Angeles Times.
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