Feb 14

Feb 14 The Most Fun We Ever Had

Author: Claire Lombardo
Publisher: Doubleday
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A 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.

TL;DR Review

The Most Fun We Ever Had is a sweeping, beautiful, crack-your-heart-open novel. It’s long, but the characters are incredible.

For you if: You like to read family sagas.

Full Review

“She and David could talk about Wendy to only a certain degree of honesty; their firstborn was emblematic of too much for them both — too much heartbreak, too much tension, too much earth-shattering love.”

Whew. Wow. When’s the last time a book made you cry? I mean really cry, like streams of tears running down your face and you need a tissue and whole minutes — or longer — to recover? This book did it for me. It grabbed me in some specific spot right inside my heart and wrung me out in the best way.

At nearly 600 pages, I can see how someone might feel like this book is too long. But I found that I was glad for all those pages, because how else are you supposed to follow an entire family of six over the course of decades, get to know them deep in their corners, fall in love with them? It’s about a couple, Marilyn and David, and their four daughters, plus one newcomer.

The thing that makes the story magic is how deeply each of these characters love, and how precisely we, as readers, internalize and feel that love. So when they smile, you smile. When they stumble, you gasp. When they triumph, you cheer. When they cry, you cry (hard, in my case).

If you need a strong plot to carry you through a book or don’t like character-driven novels, this one isn’t for you. But if you want characters who will stick with you for a long, long time, give this one a shot.