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Summary: Rebuttal to "Delusions of Postcards" Review below
Review: If you hated this book so much, why did you spend the time required in finishing it? I've found if a book is not my cup of tea, it's better to cut my losses and go onto something else. Heaven knows, there are so many books out there and not enough seconds left in my life to read all the ones I want to; but I cannot understand it when a person spends their time finishing a book that is unappealing to them and then compounds the waste by writing a mean spirited, scating review. This book is funny and revelatory and even a little bit brave, and I am glad I took the time and to read it and glad I was able to take the effort to write something positive about it.
Rating:
Summary: very good
Review: if you like books like my fractured life and postcards from edge you'll think it's very good.
Rating: 
Summary: It's absolutely brilliant
Review: If you think Carrie Fisher is just an actress turned writer, The Best Awful will convince you she's quite a marvelous novelist. I can't remember a book with a more harrowing and hilarious depiction of the inside of a bipolar mind, and leavened as it is with comic gunfire and celebrity mayhem, it's more affecting in the end than "Girl, Interrupted."
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Summary: Among the Best
Review: In terms of divine romps in fiction, THE BEST AWFUL ranks among the best of the books set in Hollywood. If borrows from recognizable real events but with a fiction twist wrapping you up as if the fiction world were true (in the same nature as MY FRACTURED LIFE). The address of relationships is precise and endearing, even if crazed (in the same nature as A PERFECT DAY). And the address of off-the-mark mentalities (crazy people) is brilliantly real (in the same nature as RUNNING WITH SCISSORS).
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Summary: BiPolar Manic Attack in the Movie Biz
Review: Keeps up the same pace set by Postcards From the Edge. At times fun, at times wicked, and at times brutal. A great overall glance at the bipolar life of faded stars. Obviously in the same style as My Fractured Life and should attract the same audience.
Rating: 
Summary: Delusions of Postcards
Review: New rule for me: if an author I really, really like takes a ten-year break between novels, don't read the result. First Donna Tartt, now Carrie Fisher. The Best Awful is just awful, an embarrassing, boring, and just awfully written masturbatory romp in the literary hay with one's own psyche.If it seems to you that I'm spewing sophomoric little plays on words in this review, it's possibly because I just finished reading ONE THOUSAND of them in this book. See, The Best Awful is the unawaited sequel to Postcards from the Edge, which surprised everyone with its witty, sarcastic, and yet touching look at the frazzled Suzanne Vale's life on the edges of Hollywood and her trying relationship to her celebrity mother (a.k.a. Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds). Not satisfied to have written her quasi-autobiography so early in her life, Fisher has returned to these characters for some personal reason that should have never been allowed to become public, no matter how en vogue little novels of fractured females have become. In this uninstallment, Vale has had a daughter and been promptly dumped not for another woman, but for a man. Oh the millennial perspective! Oh that mixed-up place called Hollywood! Of course, she reacts badly, getting off her medication and going on a drug spree that lands her in a mental institution called-get this-"Shady Lanes." With a modicum of self-control, this plot could have been as perceptively developed as Postcards was, a possible post-me-decade second look at the world Vale inhabited back then. The fact that the book is a sequel is not what's wrong with it. What's wrong with it is that it hasn't moved on to another world, that it offers no further insight into any of its characters. Instead, you get pages (and pages and pages) of Vale's self-involved, mania-induced blithering soliloquy, unedited. Pages. It's one thing to attempt to show what a mind goes through as it breaks down, and it's another thing to make a novel out of it. Unless you're impressed by tenth-grade punning such as "come hell or high daughter" or "no room at the bin," Vale's breakdown has nothing to offer other than an unsavory look at a world we saw (better) in Postcards. Nothing wrong with following around a character who neglects her daughter and abuses her friends if I care for her for some reason, because she's witty, or tortured, or a vehicle for some truth about the human soul the author has uncovered. But, if she's none of these, she's really just a chatty seatmate on a bus to whom not even the other characters in the book want to listen. In terms of it being a look into the bipolar mind, well, sure, if that's what you want, a look. But chances are the average reader is not going to care much for what she sees there, because the bipolar mind suffers from the same problems the novel does: it is neither entertaining nor a revelation of anything. It is simply a nonsensical, painful collection of broken thoughts that don't even make sense to the thinker. Or the reader.
Rating:
Summary: hooray for suzanne vale
Review: One of the best books I've read in a long time. Carrie Fisher has a brutal honesty that makes you sympathize for her while internally screaming at her for her self-destrucive behavior. A wildly entertaining look inside the mind of a manic-depressive, fallen off the horse of her medication. I can only hope for another tragedy to befall Suzanne Vale to afford me another adventure to read about.
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Summary: Humanizes Hollywood
Review: Positively Carrie Fisher's best writing since "Post Cards from the Edge". Exploring the same territory of tragedy that humanizes Hollywood stars, "The Best Awful" is a emotional and realistic story written with exceptional clarity and emotion. Written with the same level of matured emotions and humanized view of Hollywood players in the face of tragedy as recent notables "The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters" and "My Fractured Life." I give it my highest recommendation.
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Summary: Everything I Expected and MORE
Review: Postcards From The Edge and My Fractured Life are two of my favorite books of all time. I was thrilled to hear Carrie Fisher was going to continue her character from Postcards (Suzanne Vale) in a new book. The Best Awful is crazy and wonderful and everything I expected and more. I read it once and immediately started on it again. It's the best book I've read since My Fractured Life and Pleasure of My Company.
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Summary: Fisher defines our times, in all its hideous glory. Brava.
Review: Postcards From The Edge defined its time, and now after an elegant absence Ms. Fisher once more sets pen to page to amuse the rest of us mortals. Tackling the subject of manic depression is something only teh very brave and the very eloquent would assume; luckily for readers, she is both. I believe history bears this out...and The Best Awful is a great read, as well as a wonderful quasi-rebuttal to her father's conceit of a "biography" whose name hardly bears mentioning. Eddie Fisher. Proof that there is a Goddess, and that she has smiled again upon those of us who sprang from less-than-ideal loins (although i adore and respect Debbie Reynolds - a great talent and a survivor) and survived drugs, alcohol and other various maladies to triumph. Well done, Ms. Fisher. You rock.
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