The Most Fun We Ever Had

Author: Claire Lombardo
Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Family Saga
Type: Large Print Trade Paperback
Pages: 840
Source: Local Public Library
Publisher: Random House Large Print Publishing
First Published: June 25, 2019
Opening Lines: Sixteen Years Earlier: "Other people overwhelmed her. Strange, perhaps, for a woman who'd added four beings to the universe of her own reluctant volition, but a fact nonetheless: Marilyn rued the inconvenient presence of bodies, bodies beyond her control, her understanding; bodies beyond her favor."

Book Description from GoodReads: 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.

My Rating: 3 stars

My Review: As the eldest of three sisters, this book got my attention. Family drama with a bunch of sisters and ensuing familial issues? Sounds delightful, relatable and kind of cathartic. 

But my feelings for this dysfunctional family drama weren't quite so clear. Early on, I was intrigued by the complex dynamics in the Sorenson family and felt that Lombardo understood the messy, loving, frustrating and complicated dynamics between sisters. Oh m'word, so complicated. Within this hefty tome, there's lots of page time to delve into the nitty-gritty of family life and character development but I don't feel these aspects were executed as well as they could have been. 

There's a lot of jumping between timelines and POVs which confused things and there were several spots where I felt the plot languished. I kept reading because so many people waxed poetic about this book, but I found the characters dull, emotionally stunted and unlikeable (except Jonah - him I liked). It was frustrating to see these grown daughters maintain toxic issues with each other, not learn from them but continue to whine that their lives were horrible because their parents' relationship was so 'perfect'. Poor, poor rich girls. 

This wasn't a bad read, it just wasn't all that great. I ended up skimming quite a bit in the last half to see how things panned out, only to find the ending frustratingly anticlimactic. While I appreciate the topics that Lombardo addresses, this book needed a hefty edit to whittle down the long-winded plot and to tighten up character development.