Note: The following editorial reviews were written before the recent revelations by James Frey and the publisher.

Amazon.com
The electrifying opening of James Frey's debut memoir, A Million Little Pieces, smash-cuts to the then 23-year-old author on a Chicago-bound plane "covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." Wanted by authorities in three states, without ID or any money, his face mangled and missing four front teeth, Frey is on a steep descent from a dark marathon of drug abuse. His stunned family checks him into a famed Minnesota drug treatment center where a doctor promises "he will be dead within a few days" if he starts to use again, and where Frey spends two agonizing months of detox confronting "The Fury" head on:

I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.

One of the more harrowing sections is when Frey submits to major dental surgery without the benefit of anesthesia or painkillers (he fights the mind-blowing waves of "bayonet" pain by digging his fingers into two old tennis balls until his nails crack). His fellow patients include a damaged crack addict with whom Frey wades into an ill-fated relationship, a federal judge, a former championship boxer, and a mobster (who, upon his release, throws a hilarious surf-and-turf bacchanal, complete with pay-per-view boxing). In the book's epilogue, when Frey ticks off a terse update on everyone, you can almost hear the Jim Carroll Band's brutal survivor's lament "People Who Died" kicking in on the soundtrack of the inevitable film adaptation.

The rage-fueled memoir is kept in check by Frey's cool, minimalist style. Like his steady mantra, "I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal," Frey's use of repetition takes on a crisp, lyrical quality which lends itself to the surreal experience. The book could have benefited from being a bit leaner. Nearly 400 pages is a long time to spend under Frey's influence, and the stylistic acrobatics (no quotation marks, random capitalization, left-aligned text, wild paragraph breaks) may seem too self-conscious for some readers, but beyond the literary fireworks lurks a fierce debut. --Brad Thomas Parsons

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Customer Reviews

Average Customer Rating:

Whose the target audience?

Customer Rating:

I wanted to send an inspiring story to someone I'm trying to mentor from a distance. He's in an Arizona prison where he's spent a fair amount of the last 20 years for non-violent criminal offenses. To preview it, I got a copy from my local small town library. I knew of the book and the Oprah controversy. However the last book I read was Frey's "Bright Shiny Morning" which touched me in many ways. So when I picked up "A Million Little Pieces", a young employee gave it a bad review. She didn't like the language-lots of the f word- and could not get into it. I told her my reasons to read it and she thought that perhaps someone in the prison population that had a history of drug addiction and criminal behavior could benefit from Frey's story. Verdict is still out on that one. I purchased it Aug 26 and last I heard my mentee still had not received it. Apparently they have some difficulty receiving things, even books from Amazon, in prison. So his review is the one we need to have as he has a bit in common with James Frey and lots not so much. I liked this book. I learned more about alcohol and drug addiction. It may have been embellished but it wasn't sanitized. This is from a perspective of someone who went out of control early in life and the consequences of that behaviour. As in so many of these stories, James Frey came from a "privleged family" -this is what I call families whose parents are educated, successful in society and have way more wealth than most families. My mentee didn't travel that path. I hope he can identify with some of this. I hope he can also figure out how to stay off drugs. His future in life may literally depend on it.

Oprah's book club failed me

Customer Rating:

James Frey wrote a book lauded as a memoir, which turns out to be untrue. Similarly, this book was lauded as a good read. This as it turns out, is also untrue. The story of the journey through rehab is repetitious - but its worst offense is that the characters are unsympathetic. It's hard to feel sorry for them, despite their dire circumstances. Finally, this story depicts a series of dental appointments that require extensive surgery without local anesthesia. This is a ridiculous fabrication. Drug abuse is not a contraindication for local anesthesia.

Frustrating and annoying

Customer Rating:

James Frey caused quite the scandal when he had to "come clean" about coming clean. He wrote this memoir and received widespread praise for the writing and the amazing accomplishment in beating a serious drug and alcohol addiction. But after being featured on Oprah, many that were involved in Frey's true story came forward to say that his portrayal of his experience was largely exaggerated and untrue. He finally admitted that his book, A Million Little Pieces, was based on his life story, but was embellished and not entirely true. With that in mind, I sat down to read what was still touted as an amazing book. Frey chronicles his experience waking up after a serious trauma to find himself on a plane on the way to rehab. His family, after many years of not knowing what to do with him, has found him on the streets of Chicago badly beaten and in terrible shape. They are taking him to a reputable inpatient treatment center in Minnesota. James goes through a painful detoxification process and cannot come to terms with his plight in life, how he got there, and if he really wants to be clean and continue to live. The rest of the book is his next six weeks in rebab. The story is, in some ways, engrossing. The obstacles for an addict to overcome in order to stay sober are staggering. Especially when overcoming the extent of drugs and alcohol that Frey claims he had taken. He underwent oral surgury without the aid of painkillers because to give him painkillers would undo the detox he already went through. He suffered violent bouts of nausea each day while his body adjusted to the clean lifestyle. And he made friends with a cast of characters as he relayed the horrible life on the streets that he lived prior to being carted off to rehab. There are two major problems with this book however. The first is the prose. His writing style is difficult to follow and frustrating. It makes it difficult to stick with the story and annoying to read. Secondly, knowing that the story was not completely accurate made it ring hollow. It would have been fine if the reader was to believe it was completely true, or it would have been fine if it had been presented as a work of fiction. But to read along and wonder what parts were true and what parts were invented leaves the reader with a frustrating feeling of being swindled. This book had such potential, and maybe some can overlook his lies, but for me it tainted the entire story and left it feeling empty.

Real or not real? Who cares, its still good!	Customer Rating:
This is a good book. Interesting, compelling, had me hooked. Definitely one to read if you are interested in drug addiction, rehab, and the mind set of people like this. Rough language and swearing so not for teenagers.

I could not finish this book because it was too annoying

Customer Rating:

I had heard about (but not read) the Smoking Gun article before I read the book. I had also watched A Scanner Darkly (a movie based on a semi-biographical book by a former meth addict) the week before. Although I'm not a former drug addict or rehab patient, I've spent time with people who are, and the difference of the "feel of authenticity" between "Scanner" and "A Million Little Pieces" is striking. The book reads as though the author is trying to communicate immense emotion, but doesn't quite have the writing chops to pull it off. So instead, he substitutes lurid detail, and exaggerates so we'll get the point. The problem with this approach is that since the story doesn't fit the "mythological truth" of well-crafted fiction, nor the "logical pattern" of fact, an informed reader is constantly being interrupted by a nagging "that doesn't sound right" impulse. I got 80 pages into the book before deciding that I needed to look up the smoking gun article, which more or less says that James Frey made the whole thing up. I found this assertion to be the more believable. I'm not so terribly bothered by this (after all, he did get caught, and I find large-scale frauds that involve the media amusing) but I am bothered by the experience of reading. It is rare that I'll give up on a book, and I was disappointed to have to give up on this one because I had been looking forward to it. I probably also had trouble with the writing style (although I'm generally pretty adaptable, I got through Riddley Walker all right). To be fair, it is not the worst book I ever read. But I found it intensely irritating and honestly cannot understand why people like it.