Rating: 
Summary: How much is fact, and how much is fiction?
Review: I had a hard time with this book. He goes to rehab and falls in love with a crack-addicted hooker with a heart of gold, and becomes like a son to a well-known and very connected mobster? Who then asks him to be his son? Are you sure this wasn't an episode of "Touched By An Angel"?
The writing style is really annoying. I tried to like it, and attempted to think from his point of view, but the author is so pompous. And listening to him repeatedly try to convince himself he was a badass quickly became old.
From previous reviews I've read, some people obviously love this book. I don't get it.
Rating:
Summary: Don't judge this book by its cover
Review: The book's opening snagged me. From there it all went disappointingly down-hill. For me, there's very little new here. Frey's stream-of-conscious, run-on sentences made the physical act of reading the book very difficult. I found myself tripping up and having to re-read passages. I also had to read this book in small intervals. Frey as the main character is extremely angry, bitter, stubborn and hateful, it's hard to want to spend much time with him or any of the other people in this book. The overwhelming negativity throughout actually forced me to take twice as long to read. I would have stopped reading if I wasn't such a completist. However, kudos to one of the coolest book covers in a long time. It's quite fetching!
Rating: 
Summary: Rotten to the core.
Review: Having not been whipped enough as a snot-nosed brat, Frey has grown to become a snot-nosed adult still half-trapped in whinging, twisting puberty. He urinates on everything beautiful about language and literature and leaves us with nothing more than this malodorous, swollen volume of vain posturing, self-inflicted drama and egocentric triteness. Selfish, disgusting and infuriating.
Rating: 
Summary: Heartbreakingly honest
Review: James Frey's account of his recovery from alcohol and drug addiction is brilliantly written. He plunges the reader - all senses flaring - into the mind of an addict. The book is intelligent, readable, hard to put down. It belongs in every high school library, medical practice and recovery centre the world over. Thanks, James, for putting your experience in words.
Rating:
Summary: Unreadable
Review: Let me admit, at the outset, that I haven't read James Frey's A Million Little Pieces in its entirety. I feel that when one reads a book, you enter into a sort of contract with the author to read it in its entirety, if that is how it's meant to be read, as novels are. However, I found this book to be unreadable. It's not that it was boring or that the plot didn't move forward or that the characters were unbelievable, although all these things are true. Every time I sat down to read this book, I found myself actually feeling embarrased for the author. This is a book about addiction. I began reading it because I recently read Infinite Jest, another book about addiciton and one of the most fascinating and poignant books I've ever read. However, in A Million Little Pieces, James Frey's major failing is his inability to convey the complexity and subtleties of addicts' personalities and behaviours. All the addicts I encountered in this book were cliches. The dialogue was trite. And frankly, I don't give a damn how it ends.
Rating: 
Summary: Harrowing look at addiction...
Review: Although I did not especially like Frey's writing style, I suspect it reflected his frame of mind during his treatment at Hazelden. The content, as harrowing as it was, kept me interested enough to read the entire book in about 36 hours. Others have mentioned Junky, Naked Lunch, and other drug memoirs as being better; I always felt that those were, for all of their explicitness, glamourizing the junkie lifestyle. There is no glamour in Frey's addiction, he hit rock bottom and was fortunate enough to have had family and friends who had not given up on him. Reading this gave me a perspective into the life of the addict I had never known before. Frey made no excuses for his behavior, although those around him attempted to come up with reasons why he was an Addict (genetics, suspected history of abuse). AA isn't for everyone, and this is an excellent memoir of someone who succeeded without the major tenets of the group.
Rating:
Summary: A million little fragmented ideas
Review: Well, the first half of the book held my interest, but this story had such a fatal drop after that, ugh, total boredom. I couldn't even finish the book. The colorful description of having a root canal "sans novocaine" was pretty interesting and that's about it. I feel the drug use must have affected the authors sense of recall and storytelling........ Was expecting something more based on the reviews and hype I had been reading in the media about this book (as were all the other reviewers here, it seems). If you can get your hands on "Twisted: Inside The Mind of a Drug Addict" by Carl Adam Richmond, it's a much better read.
Rating:
Summary: FINALLY A BOOK PEOPLE DISAGREE ABOUT
Review: Love it or hate it, it is really exciting to see people caring enough about a book to debate it. I LOVED IT. I see the arguements against it but they they weren't enough to keep me from loving the process of reading this author. Yes, he stammered....so do I when I get insane. Yes, his ego is huge (as a writer and probably a person) but that's part of having an addictive personality which added to the truthfulness of the story. I was interested enough in the character to hate him and involved enough to love him too. Either way, I am glad I read it myself and didn't hate it to be controversial or love it to be cool. I really think it is worth the time it takes to read. He is an author that, love or hate, we at least have an opinion about.. . and that has been a long time coming.`
Rating:
Summary: A Must Read
Review: Compelling reading for anyone...but most of all for those of us who need to know more about addiction and what recovery is like.
I learned more from this book than all the others combined that I have researched.
Rating:
Summary: hard to put down
Review: Like a drug, this book is hard to put down, as has been said by others. I am only on page 170, I don't care how the book "comes out," I don't care if some of the characters are exaggerated. I like this book because of the excruciatingly slow revelation of health dawning in a sick individual, like a slow intermittent drip of clean water into a bucket of filthy water. If you have a friend in recovery, this book would be a good gift.
I do have one question. Why doesn't Hazelden permit NOVACAINE, which doesn't pass through the blood/brain barrier, to be used for patients' painful dental procedures?? It would have helped some.
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