jenniferPagebound
co-founder of Pagebound 🖤
35647 points
jenniferPagebound commented on jenniferPagebound's update
jenniferPagebound started reading...
American Rapture
C.J. Leede
13jenniferPagebound started reading...
American Rapture
C.J. Leede
13jenniferPagebound commented on MilaOnMain's review of The Bright Years
A devastating and luminous portrait of how we carry (and survive) the people we love.
I finished this book three days ago and I’m still thinking about it. Actually, that’s not quite right. I can’t stop thinking about it.
This is the kind of novel that sneaks up on you. It opens quietly with a small boy coloring under a kitchen table, and then Sarah Damoff pulls you through decades of one family’s life. Their fierce love, their devastating mistakes, their attempts to outrun their own histories. And somewhere around the middle you realize you’re completely wrecked in the best possible way.
This is a multigenerational family saga that refuses to be sentimental about any of it. Damoff writes about addiction, grief, and generational trauma with unflinching honesty, but she never makes it feel hopeless. There’s something deeply humanizing in how she shows us people trying (and sometimes failing) to be better than their worst impulses.
The prose is deceptively simple but lands with precision. Damoff has a gift for the small details. The paint flecks on someone’s hands, a specific flavor of ice cream, the way grief makes you doubt your own memories.
I was captivated by how it balances darkness with such tenderness. Yes, terrible things happen. But there’s also art and Blue Bell and grandmothers who know exactly when to make brisket. There’s the stubborn persistence of love even when it seems impossibly stupid to keep loving. There’s the question of whether we can ever escape where we come from or if the trying itself is what defines us.
This is a book about what we inherit from our parents - the good, the unbearable, and everything in between. About second chances that come too late and the ones that somehow arrive just in time. About the different timelines people need for forgiveness, and whether redemption is something you earn or something that’s given.
Fair warning: this isn’t a light read. Damoff doesn’t flinch from the hard stuff. But if you’re willing to sit with the weight of it, you’ll find something profound about resilience, about the mathematics of harm and healing, about how one life -messy, imperfect, ordinary- can contain both everything and nothing.
I cried. A lot.
12jenniferPagebound wrote a review...
Sometimes a book finds you at the exact right moment in life and changes your trajectory. The Bright Years found me cynical and weary, and left me hope-filled and in awe of life's beauty.
Through addiction, grief, impossible decisions and betrayals, the characters lose and rediscover both themselves and each other again and again. The story reminds us how life can feel impossibly short and unbearably long all at once; that the threat of loss does not negate the joy of love gained, and the only real defeat is letting pain rather than love lead us.
So many forms of love are explored: parent-child, marital, friendship, neighborly. In the face of seemingly insurmountable pain the characters choose each other despite, and in doing so remind us that no one has a monopoly on grief. We are all fighting our internal battles; extending grace and finding courage to stay soft is not only an act of defiance, but the only way to stay truly alive.
I have never cried as much reading as I did finishing the last 100 pages. The Bright Years has a very special place in my heart and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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jenniferPagebound finished a book
The Bright Years
Sarah Damoff
1jenniferPagebound finished a book
The Bright Years
Sarah Damoff
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jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
3
Search followers/following list
Not sure if this has been brought up, but I would love to search within my list of followers/following.
I have tried using the generic user search bar, but when I am specifically looking for someone I follow whose user name starts with “fae” for example it would be easier to search a smaller subset within my own list of people.
jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
7
Search notifications 🔍
Hello! I see that you’re going to make notifications sort/groupable which is v exciting. I acc wonder if it’d be possible to also add a search bar to notifications, please? I lose so many of mine and this means I leave so many people on read or just can’t be consistent with communication. I often remember the comment or something specific but don’t remember the user or the post. It’d be really handy if we could search for specific keywords and usernames too! (I know im sending a bunch at once but no pressure of course, I understand)
jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
4
pinning comments
i know there’s been talks of pinning things in quest forums, but i was wondering it it could be possible to pin comments underneath any post or list (as OP)? sometimes i have to scroll quite a bit to find important comments on posts/lists with lots of comments!
jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
3
Profile Links
When checking my notifications, I often want to go to the profile of the person who liked or commented on my update. I understand why this is not included in upvote notifications, but when the profile is named, it would be nice if tapping on their profile picture or name within the notification brought you directly to the profile!
jenniferPagebound is interested in reading...
A Dead Djinn in Cairo (Dead Djinn Universe, #0.1)
P. Djèlí Clark
0jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
2Share a URL link to a Shelf
I would love to be able to share a link specifically to a shelf that I’ve created to share with friends that aren’t in the Pagebound app yet - this probably could apply to quests and lists too
jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
5
Sort reviews by star rating
I would really like to the ability to filter book reviews by their star rating for each book. I typically look at 3 star book reviews when determining whether to DNF a book. Sorting by lowest rated and highest rated can make it harder to find three star reviews for books that are popular. Especially as the app continues to grow, and more reviews come in, I anticipate it will become more difficult to find reviews that are not the highest or the lowest.
I know that y’all offer half stars too, so I am not sure whether something like filtering by 3/3.5, 4/4.5 would work.
