A review by ellieb_reads
The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff

emotional sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix

4.0

There was a lot I liked here. The beginning of Lillian and Ryan’s love story was really sweet. Lillian’s friendship with Shauna and Jet’s friendship with Kendi felt so warm and real. The passages about grief throughout the book were stunning. I appreciated the way the story handled alcoholism and generational trauma. But the pacing of the book was a little off to me. Really big events happened in a really casual way, while more mundane happenings got multiple pages of prose. There were a lot of huge plot points, but it felt like Damoff was determined to make this a character-driven novel, and that resulted in a pace that was always either too slow or too fast. But still, this was pretty good (and very very sad), and I was invested in the characters from start to finish.