Rating: 
Summary: Started off good, lost wind at the end
Review: "The Best Awful" wasn't a horrible book, but it wasn't great either. The first 1/2 was fair. Carrie Fisher put just enough humor and interesting people in the mix to keep me interested in the story. 3/4 through the book, my interest started to wane. The story got less and less interesting. There was too much of Suzanne's thinking once she was in the mental hospital. I couldn't make it throught to the end. I had totally lost interest.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful
Review: "The Best Awful" is wonderful, a compelling work whose humor belies a heartrending truth. In dealing with mental illness, Fisher doesn't sanitize insanity, but gives us a hard, unsparing look at what happens when a mind is lost, or rather, when it's found on an out-of-this-world plane. She takes us along a harrowing trip, harnessed to fast, furious, and funny prose. The strange thing is, it's a curl-up-under-the-covers read, a safe haven, where not only do you appreciate your own boring "normalcy," you develop a compassion you never knew you had. While Suzanne Vale's pain is so real, her rantings so over-the-detailed-top, it's her humanity that's still front and center -- an amoral ethicist pontificating on what it means to live a large life made larger by turning small. You have to read it to get that line! A beautifully done job. Fisher is a celebrity who truly deserves to be celebrated. And no, I'm not a friend, and until now, I wasn't a thumbs-up-to-the-sky fan.
Rating:
Summary: here's what i didn't like...
Review: ...the fact that the husband 'decides' he's no longer gay. this is an insult to all of us, regardless of sexual orientation. was it supposed to be a joke, a mockery of closeted men in show biz who decide it's just easier to be married to women? i don't think so - he had already come out. i was willing to forgive other flaws, but when i got to the end and read that one, i just thought, forget it. the carrie fisher of old wouldn't have made that choice as a writer. it's too bad, too, because i always admired her writer's voice and i counted on her to tell the truth. is it too late to bring back the old carrie? i truly hope not.
Rating:
Summary: 5 Star Look at Hollywood
Review: A very entertaining situational book with many extreme explorations. The author dares to view Hollywood through honest eyes even when that vision is of the ravages of addiction and the oblivion of mental illness. Many similarities to Permanent Midnight and My Fractured Life.
Rating:
Summary: No bull, no boring roman a clef, just a gem...
Review: Arthur Miller, the playwright, once said something along the lines of, "Agony, sure I have agony. But everybody has agony. The difference is that I take mine home and try to make it sing."From Carrie Fisher, we get an aria, and quite a successful one at that. I was expecting to be entertained by The Best Awful, and I was, yet the novel is far more satisfying than Hollywood fluff. Whatever insights the author has earned through her turbulent/famous/funny life have given her depth and substance as an author. Fisher offers up sharp dialogue (not just a string of one-liners), a vivid but unpreachy view of mental health and its absence, and characters so real that I expected to see them sitting next to me on the sofa. Wow.
Rating:
Summary: Visionary Recognition of a Damaged Soul
Review: Books about Hollywood can be as bland and fabricated as the plastic image the town is generalized to represent. On the other hand, when an author takes the time to develop his or her characters with brilliant detail and human flaws while recognizing the damaged soul of Hollywood itself - the results can be amazing. "THE BEST AWFUL" by Carrie Fisher is amazing to say the least. Her characters strike back to the writing style of 80s authors Jay McInerney ("BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY") and Bret Easton Ellis ("AMERICAN PSYCHO"). The details of the story and honest notions on the soul sucking nature of the entertainment industry is on the same visionary scale as "HOLLYWOOD ANIMAL" by Joe Eszterhas and "MY FRACTURED LIFE" by Rikki Lee Travolta. A+ Material.
Rating: 
Summary: I really wanted to like this book
Review: But I didn't. The best(?) parts are the passages where Fisher describes her altar ego's crackup/meltdown/breakdown. But I have to agree with an earlier reviewer who said that if she had not been who she is this would never have seen the light of day. I can't believe there was an editor on this thing: it's disjointed, confused, rambling, and generally, overall, not very well done. Yet, there are lines in this book that are sheer poetry, but you've got to make your way through so much junk to get to them that it's hardly worth the effort.
Rating: 
Summary: Dazzling prose.
Review: Carrie Fisher has become a poet, a painter with words, a fountain of musical utterance. I have enjoyed her other novels, particularly Postcards - and welcomed the chance to meet up again with Suzanne. But this book is no "mere" sequel. On its own, it mesmerizes, hypnotizes, takes one on a magic carpet of language to the unnamable realm of feeling and emotion. Here is the Artist, fully realized. What a privilege.
Rating: 
Summary: Just Awful
Review: Carrie Fisher's Best Awful is not a book that would ever be published if it were not for her fame. I am a big fan of hers as an actress, and I can certainly respect the need to write as a form of therapy for one's life, but this book is not well written. Mostly it is long lists of disconnected thoughts. At first I thought that she was trying to make the reader feel as if they were in a manic episode, and she succeeded at that, but as it continued throughout the 200 plus pages, it grew tiresome. I was in no way attached to the protagonist's problems, or the outcome. There were a few very funny things in the book, but all in all not worth the effort.
Rating:
Summary: THE MOST AWFUL
Review: Carrie Fisher's new book is, in one word, awful. I couldn't even get past the first forty or so pages. It's not even a beach read. This woman only adds to the stigma of mental illness. Doesn't she get it? Mental illness is not chic. A big zero. Don't waste your money. Donate it to a charity.
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