From My Book Shelves 1

Nothing earth shattering in my life this summer.  Pretty flowers in the garden, 

major excavations in the yard across the way, dinner contemplation ongoing, but you don't really care about those things so, how about a review of one of the best books I've read over the last year? 

Frey wrote a couple of earlier books, A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard to be precise, to considerable critical acclaim then got trashed for publishing them as "autobiographical" when some of the content was made up.  I suspect that's somewhat true of most autobiographies.  Memory is faulty, and most of us have a lot of moments in our life that we're likely to embellish and fictionalize to suit a more pleasing version of the life we'd like to have led.  Writers, perhaps more than most, walk that thin line between narrative and reality.  I confess I haven't read either of Frey's earlier books although both are on my TBR list, just a s a curiosity.  

Sadly, my TBR list seems to always be growing longer as I cross a book off the top and add two to the bottom, so whether I'll ever get to them or not remains to be seen, but this one came to me via a Netgalley review request and I'm so very happy it did and so, without further ado, here's my review of Katrina, while I was still basking in the afterglow of a book I really enjoyed. 

Katrina by James Frey

In a world where books are slotted neatly into a five star rating system, every once in awhile, you come across one that rates a solid seven ... maybe even an eight or a nine. Katerina was that book. Half a dozen pages into reading it, I knew it was going to be a long night, because I wasn't going to want to put it down. I also knew it would make me laugh (I wasn't disappointed) and that it would make me cry (it did).
At it's simplest, this is a love story; a star-crossed romance between an aspiring young writer and a beautiful model, set in the Paris of the early 1990s. At it's heart, Katerina is so much more. It's about youth and hope and possibilities. It's about art and the artist, about literature and the enormous potential it possess, when it's right, to “burn down the world”. It's about friends and lovers and dreams and passion. In short, Katerina is about life, in all it's beauty and it's magic and it's tragedy.
I can't promise you will love James Frey's new novel (although I did), but I'm pretty sure you won't quickly forget it, and maybe, if you're very lucky, it'll be one of those books that will change your life.