The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff starts off with a romcom vibe and ends up unexpectedly heavier, revealing the complexity of human life.
The novel is told through three perspectives: Ryan, Lillian, and their daughter, Georgette. Each one carries a different piece of the same story, and together they build a wide-ranging perspective on interpersonal emotional connection.
Ryan and Lillian meet in a library, exactly like a romcom, as I mentioned above. There’s charm, chemistry, and the fluttery beginning-of-love energy. But Damoff doesn’t let the sweetness sit unexamined for long. Underneath it, both of them are dragging around wounds from their pasts.
Ryan grew up in a broken home. His mother fled an abusive relationship and raised him on her own, and unconsciously, that shapes him more than he’d like to admit. He’s a photographer with a dream of opening his own art gallery, and he means it when he promises to be a better man for Lillian and a better father to their daughter, Georgette (nicknamed Jet). As a reader, I could sense that he tries. Then alcoholism creeps in, and he starts repeating the very patterns he swore he’d escape. One tragic mistake eventually forces him out of the life he built for his family, and watching that unravel is one of the most gutting parts of the book.
Lillian’s story is as tragic as Ryan’s. She’s carrying a secret of her own: as a teenager, she gave up a child for adoption after her first love chose music over becoming a father. She believed Ryan was her second chance at the life she wanted. Instead, she ends up watching the man she fell for slowly disappear into someone she barely recognizes anymore.
Georgette grows up mostly under the care of her Nana Elise, Ryan’s mother, and she carries resentment toward her parents for all the secrets they kept from her. Her chapters are where the book’s bigger picture starts to come together. When she meets Davis, her mother’s adopted son, pieces of the family puzzle finally click into place for her.
The Bright Years pulls off a tricky balancing act. It reads with the ease of popular fiction, the kind you can fly through in a weekend, but it carries the emotional depth of literary fiction underneath. Damoff shows the messiness of life through addiction, generational trauma, and family secrets. To make the story more interesting, she uses three perspectives to show how complicated a single person can be, and how much more complicated a family becomes when everyone is guarding their own version of the truth.
If you’re looking for a story that starts light and ends up meaningful, this one is worth picking up.
My Favorite Bits
- I’ve learned how big of a dream it is to have a small life. That the cost of ambition is high.
- I don’t need recognition. I just want something stable where I can make enough money for things like books and meat and gifts for friends.
- I disagree, but I have to keep this to myself. I have my own darkness; I just don’t wear mine like he does.
- I begin to understand that keeping a child is like keeping a sky—always with me but never mine.
- There are two kinds of grief at a wake: grieving the loss of what was and grieving the loss of what wasn’t.
- “You said the sun shines on the other side of the world when it’s night on our side. So somewhere else there’s sunshine even though I can’t see it from here.”
Author: Sarah Damoff
Publication date: 22 April 2025
Number of pages: 288 pages
Leave a Reply