This book wanted to pretend like it wasn't Christian pedagogy so bad.

The Bright Years started out strong. A complex story about grief, familial disconnection, womanhood and motherhood that promised deep reflection, raw emotion, and tragedy interwoven with hope and healing.

Especially potent for me was the central theme circled around the first third of the book: How do you process grief for a person that is still living, yet lost? The book was moving toward such a nuanced understanding, asking the reader how far love can stretch, and what happens when love is no longer enough.

Damoff's writing style is both her greatest strength and her greatest weakness. Shining with stunning imagery and thought-provoking philosophy, there were several times I stopped in awe.

These moments were overshadowed by the many times Damoff picked up a sledgehammer and beat me over the head with her morality. So many lines so eye-rollingly on-the-nose that there was no room to breathe, let alone feel what Damoff was trying to make me feel. Symbolism so in-your-face that it might as well have been neon flashing signs.

The boundary of the imagination of The Bright Years is narrow. The ultimate salvation in this book comes through birth, motherhood, marriage. Family redeems pain, birth redeems loss, continuity redeems trauma, and faith redeems harm. Deep down, The Bright Years wants you to believe that there is something that will make suffering meaningful and redemptive.

The book constantly circles around the idea of children bringing meaning, hope, and healing. That children can save your life, and it's okay if they are harmed in the process, because redemption is possible, and forgiveness can be earned.

In a book about grief, cycles, and how the choices we make ripple into generations, quietly returning to the idea of family being a form of destiny is constrained. Not malicious, but morally small. It's claustrophobic, a socially sanctioned morality that aligns extremely neatly with white, middle-class, patriarchal norms of success and healing.

Stripping away what the book intends to do, and looking at what it achieves, I'm only left with an empty feeling that there is a right way to suffer, a right way to womanhood, a right way to grieve, a right way to end the cycle. Dark topics like adoption, abuse, addiction, eating disorders lack the emotional weight they deserve when they are used as plot devices to push a moral conclusion.

What gets lost in all of this is the real-world harm. Suffering doesn't always build character. Cycles don't always end in redemption. Self-sacrifice isn't always virtuous. Love doesn't always overcome addiction or transcend harm. This book ends in a version of reality denied to so many people, and wraps it in a moralizing package. If your addict parents didn't choose redemption, it's not because they didn't love you, but also it kind of is.

The Bright Years is a package of evangelical values without the evangelical disclosure. So much opportunity for complex discussions of abuse, healing, and generational cycles, and all I could ever feel while reading was emotionally manipulated.