Una mañana radiante es una novela sobre la ciudad de Los Ángeles, sobre los millones de habitantes que han llegado
allí en busca de sus sueños, sobre los golpes de suerte que pueden encontrarse en sus avenidas y sobre la terrible miseria que se esconde en sus callejones. Entre ellos están Dylan y Maddie, unos adolescentes que han huido de sus casas, completamente enamorados y que sobreviven gracias a la amabilidad de extraños; Esperanza, una chica méxico-americana nacida pocos segundos después de que sus padres consiguieran cruzar la frontera estadounidense; Joe y Beatrice, un viejo alcohólico y una adolescente adicta a la metadona; Amberton Parker, un actor
famosísimo y casado que esconde su homosexualidad y que se encapricha de un exjugador de rugby… Una novela, en fn, sobre personas consumidas por una gran ciudad.

Great stories (though depressing) and great writing.

There were sections on facts about LA interspersed in the stories. In most cases the facts were interesting, “and fun. REALLY fucking fun”, but in some cases they went on and on and became almost hypnotic where I zoned out and would have to bring my attention back to the commonality of all these tragedies. Well done, Frey.

I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because I’m not sure I would recommend this to my friends. Right now, I never want to visit LA thanks to this book and that’s not a feeling I want to spread.

Also, the music in the audiobook was really annoying and sometimes made it hard to hear the story. Not sure what the producers were thinking on that one. ( )

Five star book this.
This is a novel all about Los Angeles and an assortment of characters throw in for good measure.
These characters are Old Joe a tramp who drinks Chablis he is only 39 looks to be in his 70s
Amberton a Hollywood top actor who is secretly gay and obsessed by his agent.
Esperanza born in the USA to Mexican parents she takes a job cleaning for a horrible old woman.
Dyaln and Maddie two young runaways they are in love and starting to start out fresh but find it tough.
None of these stories combine all loose and jog along at their own pace. I felt like I got to know each of these characters and cared what happened to them.

Lots of random facts about LA thrown in throughout this book.
I really enjoyed this. ( )

An interesting book- in that it has a strange use of punctuation - or lack of it. (Like no comma in the title) The book varies between stories of people in LA and the history of LA (which I think is non-fiction). No real rhyme or reason to the book but several story threads followed throughout the book while several were left dangling. No resolution to the stories were provided, but in a way they were resolved. All in all I really enjoyed it! ( )

Wow, I had the best time with this big exuberant book, a fact-fiction guide to Los Angeles that sprawls like the city itself across 400+ pages and if you haven't been, after reading this you won't need to, or possibly won't want to.

It's a series of short stories - some less than a page long - covering the lives of LA residents - actors, art dealers, journalists, gangsters, immigrants, mini-golf proprietors, rough sleepers...there is barely a facet he doesn't cover in some way or another. I'm not normally a fan of short stories, but the skill of this author is in making the reader care about his characters within seconds. I can't explain why, but it's a magic ingredient and he's got it. Of the many hundreds of characters met within the course of the book, most will not be encountered again, but four storylines are continued at intervals throughout the book. Three are ramped up to a moment of high tension towards the end, and it was only at this point that I slightly resented the intervening fact chapters, lists and so on that prevented me finding out what happened next.

Like so many other books these days, this one eschews speech marks ( and commas too for the most part). I've whinged many a time about authors who do this, and normally I'd take at least one star off the rating, but there were times when I thought it helped the story along. In conversations between two people, you can always figure out who's speaking, and I found I was gliding effortlessly through the prose as though on skates - it was good to be free of the million-and-one synonyms for "said" and the intrusive descriptions of facial contortions you get with some books (yes Twilight I'm talking about you).

Where this technique falls down is where you have more than two people in a conversations, and let's face it, it does happen from time to time. Then it gets really complicated. The author chooses to precede speech with the speaker's name, rather like a play, but the name appears on the line above, and it gets doubly confusing if a person speaks another person's name. It all leads me back to thinking speech marks are there for a reason, and all these authors trying to reinvent the wheel - or trying to de-invent it, or pretend we never needed the damned wheel in the first place - should just stop it. But that's just my opinion, and I'm not taking any stars off my rating because I loved loved loved this book, faults and all. ( )