The Bright Years – Sarah Damoff
I came to "The Bright Years" on my husband's insistence. He'd been in a months-long reading slump, and this book broke it. Spoiler alert: we have very different opinions on this novel.
Sarah Damoff's story follows the Bright family across several decades — Ryan and Lillian, deeply in love and deeply secretive with each other, and their daughter Georgette, who comes of age watching their relationship fracture and repair and fracture and repair under the weight of what they've hidden.
The first half is the stronger half. Damoff has a real gift for turns of phrase, and the early sections — the courtship, the gallery years and the slow surfacing of their respective secrets — move quickly and pull you in. The addiction storyline is handled with particular care, and Lillian's resolve to protect Georgette feels true rather than melodramatic. For anyone who has loved someone with an addiction, it will hit close to home.
The problem is that the novel peaks around the halfway mark. What follows is a cascade of loss — deaths, estrangements, reconciliations and more deaths — that started to feel like trauma for trauma's sake rather than a story building toward something. The writing also gets a bit hackneyed.
Lillian's death, Ryan's eventual liver failure, Georgette's bulimia — raised and then largely dropped — her rushed reunion with her half-brother. None of it is handled badly, exactly, but none of it is given the weight I was expecting, and that's what left me largely disappointed.
Maybe a hot take, but I found Georgette to be the novel's weakest element. The structure moves through years so quickly that interiority gets sacrificed for momentum, and she never quite becomes a fully realized person. It reminded me of watching "Boyhood" — that same experience of dropping in on a life across time and filling in the blanks but without feeling like you'd seen a complete story. It’s more a series of vignettes than a novel.
Ryan's sections, by contrast, have a somber elegance the rest of the book never quite matches. His is the voice I wanted more of.
The audiobook features solid work from Joy Osmanski as Lillian and Lee Osorio as Ryan, but Ferdelle Capistrano's Georgette was a bit over the top — a performance that compounded rather than corrected the character's flatness on the page. I'm not sure I would've finished this in print, so audio was the right call regardless.
"The Bright Years" is a compelling enough story and I can see why it resonates. There are books that swing for the same thing and actually get there (i.e., “A Little Life, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” and “Commonwealth”), and I’d recommend those first.
This one comes close at times, but close isn't quite enough.
Rating (story): 3/5 stars
Rating (narration): 3/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: April 22 – April 26, 2026
Multi-tasking: Good to go. The pacing is brisk enough that background listening works, though the addiction sections reward closer attention.
