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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN num: 9780061573132
ISBN number: 0061573132
Label: Harper
Manufacturer: Harper
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 512
Printing Date: May 01, 2008
Publishing house: Harper
Release Date: May 13, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 3804
Studio: Harper
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Product Description:
One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers his very first novel—a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original.
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.
Throughout this strikingly powerful novel there is the relentless drumbeat of the millions of other stories that, taken as a whole, describe a city, a culture, and an age. A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.
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Rated by buyers 
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There's been a lot of negative ink about Frey's latest book, probably people who are mad at him for having betrayed Oprah.
This effort is huge in scope. It's influenced by the movie CRASH (which is one of my favorites) and in a way I saw echoes of SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY and FERN HILL...only with graphic violence and sex. In a way, reading this is very much like using Google maps to explore Los Angeles.
Some characters are sustained throughout the book, others make brief appearances and are seen no more. Throughout the book we are told facts (how factual? good question) about the history of Los Angeles. Frey keeps his chapters short, so I kept reading and kept telling myself just one more characters.
Several have said that the characters are "cliches" which may be true, until you think about it. A few cliches that come to mind:
Myself: Work in law enforcement Tuesday through Friday, spend my nights writing book and movie reviews, poetry and short stories; regular churchgoer; vote Republican. Done to death, major cliche. Worse yet: go to my homepage on the computer, there's a link to a screenplay I'm working on.
Mrs. Bear: Music teacher, ditto church, ditto Republican, takes care of the grandbabies a lot.
Older daughter: Lives inside the loop in Houston, semi-glamorous job, good wardrobe, tremendous wit and sense of humor, married, child free, grown stepchildren. Wow. Nothing original there.
Younger daughter: Divorced single mom, senior in college, hard worker, no social life, still not dating. A good part for Reese Witherspoon, but still nowhere near unique.
Yep. It looks like everyone I know is a chiche.
My only gripe about Frey's book was that I didn't want it to end. I looked forward to diving into at night before bed and felt bad when I reached the end.
It's a good read. Enjoy.
Rated by buyers -
For two weeks I couldn't wait to get home from work and pick up this book. Mr Frey, thanks for helping me through two weeks of dark cold Seattle evenings.
Rated by buyers -
I loved this book. It was full of interesting characters all connected by their pursuit of happiness in a city that seeks to personify the American dream.
Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers -
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 very 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 subsequent 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.
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