I chose to read this book because I loved A Million Little Pieces. Whether that piece of work was true or not, it was a fascinating read and I enjoyed it very much. Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey is a fiction novel, yet throughout the chapters following a different selection of characters are short facts and pieces of history about Los Angeles, the true main character of this book.
This book details several different stories within it. There is a young couple who ran away to LA to try to make their dreams come true, a Mexican woman who works as a maid and deals with issues of confidence, a group of homeless men led by Old Man Joe, and a movie star named Amberton Parker and his wife. James Frey gives you bits and pieces of their lives, skipping between them and interspersing the narratives with information about the city (“The average citizen of Los Angeles consumes 250 tacos a year,” p.255). I have no idea whether these tidbits that are put in are true but they provide a much needed break from the intensity of the lives of these characters.
This was a bit of a hard heavy book for me to read. Paragraph form and punctuation weren’t used in a traditional sense so I would need to reread a sentence or section to make sure I had it right. Plus, the topics dealt with by the characters were hard…and did not always end with dreams being fulfilled. However this book worked for me and I kept turning pages, sometimes skimming through sections, to get back to the characters to find out what happened next.
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