Review of The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff

The Bright Years tracks a family through years of life shaped by alcoholism, secrets, tragedy, and messy redemption. The story kept me at an emotional remove, but I was most struck by Damoff's characterization of addiction and those in its orbit.

Sarah Damoff's novel begins with a young couple, both reeling from past traumas, who forge a future together. But secrets, addiction, and disappointment are threads that run through their lives and largely keep them apart.

The Bright Years follows multiple generations through ups and downs, and tracks the messy mix of joy and sadness that make up the many days, months, and years in the characters' lives.

The book's synopsis paints a picture of a potentially charged story, but Damoff tells us this story rather than showing it, which kept me somewhat removed from its immediacy and from feeling a strong emotional link to it. Details at times felt too cute for me and took me out of the moment. The sometimes too-clean links placed in the reader's path made me feel a little undervalued as a reader able to draw my own links, and for me this also made the novel feel a little bit overplanned and less authentic than it might have felt. (One minor example: When Gette is a grown woman, she conveniently recalls a moment when she was a very young child and her mother cried when reading a story to her, and she specifically recalls that the book was Are You My Mother? which ties in quite neatly to a key secret within the book.)

For me, the strongest element of the novel was the laying bare of the unreliability, heartbreak, and hopelessness of addiction. Because we spend the majority of time in Lillian's point of view (we later hear from Ryan and daughter Georgette--called Gette), we witness the struggle to exist in the orbit of someone floundering through life with alcoholism without being sucked into a loved one's whorl and destruction. She raises Gette alone, first lonely, then resigned, then, terrifyingly, hopeful again. When we hear from Ryan, we view his crooked logic; his wreck of a path forward; his pattern of behavior, which is shaped by his life in the shadow of his broken father; and, ultimately, some redemption.

I loved that Damoff didn't make the reconciliations among characters too fast, clean, or easy. After prolonged disappointment, hardened hearts, failed attempts, and years of heartbreak, coming back together requires imaginging and building a new version of relationships and boundaries, forgiveness and forgetting, and Damoff deftly handles this realistically muddled jumble of confusion and the hints of hope that slowly emerge.

I received a prepublication edition of The Bright Years, which was published last spring, courtesy of NetGalley and Simon & Schuster.

More Family Stories

If you like reading stories about families, you might want to check out the books at this link.

For more books that address addiction, please take a look here. Check out this link for redemption stories, this link for books with family secrets, and for stories about difficult family situations, check out these books.