The Most Fun We Ever Had
Score: 5/5 Bookmarks
The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo was one of my favorite reads so far this year. It was joyful, heartbreakingly sad, and full of love all at the same time. It’s a multigenerational story of a family, their relationships to each other, the outside world, and the things that both bind them together and tear them apart.
Having a daughter of my own I found myself thinking often about what she’ll be like when she grows up, will I face any of the same challenges in the book, or have the same closeness. It made me appreciative for my own insane family of misfits and wish we weren’t so dispersed across the globe.
All in all, I loved it, and I hope you will too. I listened to it via libro.fm (which gives part of the proceeds of each book back to a brick-and-mortar bookshop that you designate), and it was beautifully narrated by Emily Rankin. In fact, she did such a wonderful job I’m already searching for other audiobooks she’s performed. You can get three for one audiobooks by using the button below, or clicking here.
Or you can get the physical book here.
Synopsis:
A dazzling, multigenerational novel in which the four adult daughters of a Chicago couple--still madly in love after forty years--recklessly ignite old rivalries until a long-buried secret threatens to shatter the lives they've built.
When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that's to come. By 2016, their four radically different daughters are each in a state of unrest: Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator-turned-stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt when the darkest part of her past resurfaces; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. Above it all, the daughters share the lingering fear that they will never find a love quite like their parents'.
As the novel moves through the tumultuous year following the arrival of Jonah Bendt--given up by one of the daughters in a closed adoption fifteen years before--we are shown the rich and varied tapestry of the Sorensons' past: years marred by adolescence, infidelity, and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.
Spanning nearly half a century, and set against the quintessential American backdrop of Chicago and its prospering suburbs, Lombardo's debut explores the triumphs and burdens of love, the fraught tethers of parenthood and sisterhood, and the baffling mixture of affection, abhorrence, resistance, and submission we feel for those closest to us. In painting this luminous portrait of a family's becoming, Lombardo joins the ranks of writers such as Celeste Ng, Elizabeth Strout, and Jonathan Franzen as visionary chroniclers of our modern lives.
