very popular with readers, great family saga weaving together the generations. will look forward to more by this young author.

I almost put the book down after the first 100 pages, confused with characters and timelines. However, once I got into the rhythm of the writing, I really enjoyed it. Marilyn and David have a marriage that is idealized by their four daughters, Wendy, Violet, Liza and Grace. The betrayals, jealousies, and ultimately love shared by the sisters is so realistic. Their relationships never seem to live up to their image of their parents’, as they struggle through adolescence to adulthood. Highly recommend, but you have to stick with it.

The Most Fun We Ever Had read like a Netflix program I was bingeing on. I didn’t want to come up for air. The Sorenson family was the family next door, a family from TV and your own family all scrambled together. Every reader can relate to some part of it. This prolific story covered a gamut of issues that can often feel forced, but not in this gem. The issues came about in an authentic and meaningful way.

I’ve been recommending this book to everyone and some have been scared off by the length. Do not worry about it, you’ll end the book wanting to metaphorically binge on the next season (sequel?). It’s interesting that the author is a mere thirty-years-old, with no children, and has created a wise and nuanced novel with such emotional precision. In an interview in the NY Times she says, “I had to remind myself I’m allowed to write about things I don’t know, like a 40-year marriage. I just had to do my emotional homework.” This whole book is an ode to family, including all the highs and lows of marriage, parenting, sibling rivalry, birth order, secrets, disfunction, adoption, tradition, widowhood, infertility, depression, anxiety, the resurfacing of lies, secrets and the power of love.

Each of the characters were allowed their own perspective and often transitioned between past and present, character to character within a page. Thank you, Claire Lombardo, for believing that we, the readers, can follow along with the story without having to timestamp and document whose voice is coming through. This was brilliant storytelling! I also appreciated Jonah’s character; his voice, as an outsider to the Sorenson’s dysfunction, was a great lens to looks through.

Not to pressure the author, but she’s got a lot to live up to so this isn’t a one-hit wonder. I’m certain she’ll hit it out of the park if this book is any indication of what’s in store for her next book.

Highly recommend!

Such a lovely, beautifully written family saga. I'm drawn to novels that explore the depths of family and Claire Lombardo has creating a novel with getting into. Told from multiple perspectives using both past and present to represent the story, a reader gets to understand the heart of this family. This novel will captivate you, it sure did for me.

I am really torn about this book. I called it a "did not finish" at about 50%. I really, really wanted to like it - I'm a librarian in the area where the book takes place, and it's tremendously popular in our community right now. So, I guess it doesn't matter too much what my opinion is, the book clearly sells itself. :) I will say that the storyline of the eldest daughter Wendy is by far the highlight of the book. She is funny, irreverent, and altogether entertaining. There's not enough of her! The feature that made me put the book down was the seemingly endless parade of interminable passages describing how in love the parents are with each other. It became weird how the author seemed hellbent on driving that home. Once I found out how young the author was, that made sense - she wasn't really writing that part from any sort of life experience. The thing that made me sad to put the book down was that it IS very entertainingly written. Some of the passages are simply captivating. I loved feeling part of this moneyed family, and of course the local appeal is there too. Claire Lombardo has some real talent and is a writer to watch - I will definitely look out for her next novel. Thank you!

Sometimes you're just in the mood for a family saga and this one does not disappoint. It's plot points are similar to other dramas, the difference being the palpable love of the characters for each other, fully fleshed out.

A story of life and love and family. The Sorenson's adore each other, David and Marilyn can barely keep their hands off of each other, much to the embarassment of their 4 daughters. Their daughters struggle to find love and happiness that measure up to their parent's. But are their parent's as happy as they seem?

The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo was one of the most delightful books that I've read this summer! I fell in love with all of the members of the Sorenson family and hated to finish the book and leave them all behind. David and Marilyn are living a crazy life of work and raising their 4 daughters while still remaining as in love as they were at the beginning of their relationship. So many family secrets and dramas abound in this book. Read and enjoy!

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 also listened to the audiobook, 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.

Books over 300 pages intimidate me, but somehow I was able to get through this one easily. The Sorenson family starts like any normal family would - with love. But having four girls will create a chaotic life for just about anyone. The family faces many struggles but somehow still finds themselves there for one another in the end.

The book drew me in with the character development, and how open and honest the lives of the family members felt. Truly no stone was left unturned. I can't even count the number of "oh my gosh," moments that I had throughout this book.

I hope you are able to get your hands on a copy of this book soon! Thank you NetGalley, DoubleDay Books, and Claire Lombardo for an ARC of this novel!

Where do I even begin? This novel completely captivated my heart from page one in a way that is almost indescribable.

I am a mother of five girls and I am madly and ridiculously in love with my husband of almost 2 decades. I connected with Marilyn and David in ways that I've never connected with characters before.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that page after page I gasped at the way Claire Lombardo puts words together. I am going to buy this book so that I can highlight the passages that I fell in love with. Lombardo describes parenthood, love, sisterhood, and life PERFECTLY.

This book is an absolute gift and a beautiful treasure. It will be in my heart and on my mind for many years to come.

I loved this. I saw someone compare it to Commonwealth, which I think is apt--they're both about the weird, complicated, intense bonds between siblings that form when their parents are more interested in themselves than in their children. In Commonwealth, that was actually the case, but in The Most Fun We Ever Had, the idea that their parents love each other more than them seems to be as much a story the siblings tell each other as it is the actual truth. Lombardo does a masterful job interweaving the different characters' histories and moving back and forth through time in a way that heightens interest in both the present-day story (which is increasingly gripping without ever quite tipping into melodrama) and the unfolding history (ditto).

I was totally caught up in this story about a family, particularly one of four sisters. I saw so many things that reminded me of my relationships with my own sisters.

The Most Fun We Ever Had
Claire Lombardo Doubleday

The white, middle-class, Midwest suburban family, in all its normalcy and dysfunction, is the subject of Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had. Ms. Lombardo has a MFA in fiction, and both her natural ability and her learned skills are on display in this auspicious debut novel.
David Sorenson and Marilyn Connolly meet each other in a college stairwell in 1975, become almost instantly entangled, and go on to marry and produce offspring. Still smitten with each other as they approach their fortieth anniversary, they preside over their ever-expanding family, dispensing wisdom, love and unintended misery to their children and grandchildren.
The story meanders back and forth through four decades, tracing the evolution of the Sorenson clan, from the meet-cute of parents David and Marilyn, through the birth of their four daughters, and on into the twenty-first century adulthood of those same children, some of whom are now parents themselves. Secrets flourish. Relationships are undermined, manipulated, and healed. Plots thicken, resolve, and thicken again.
The story develops over these decades in a non-chronological fashion, through time shifts that are occasionally jarring and sometimes used as a device to make the novel appear more complicated and suspenseful than necessary. Ms. Lombardo is a talented writer who has created a believable, multifaceted family and has also provided readers with enough bona fide plot twists to keep them turning pages. A more linear narrative, or at least longer pauses between time jumps, would have enhanced the experience.
The author invites us into the minds of the Sorenson clan, including the perspective of the oldest and most unexpected grandchild. Each person is rich and vividly portrayed, with his or her own unique and nuanced personalty, style and characteristics. While seven points of view plus the authorial narrative voice can at times be confusing, the balance never tips over into chaos.
Although traversing some similar territory, Ms. Lombard does not write in the style of Anne Tyler and the Sorensons are definitely not the Waltons. The dialogue is often profanely humorous and sexually frank. The women in the family, for all their post-graduate degrees, hard-won insights into their own and each other’s psyches, and modern technological know-how, have apparently yet to discover contraceptives.
Family dynamics are the central core of this novel. Each child is fundamentally affected by the always-on-display bond between their parents. One resents her parents’ obvious adoration of each other. “We’re all emotionally stunted because you and Dad love each other more than you love us,” the eldest daughter, Wendy, tells her mother. A different daughter despairs of ever finding such a strong partnership for herself, while yet another is buoyed by their romance – if it happened to her parents it can happen to her, too.
Sibling relationships are also relentlessly examined. Wendy and Violet are ‘Irish twins,” born less than one year apart. Their love, rivalry, jealousy and manipulation of each other knows no bounds. Liza is the middle child, lost in the shuffle of the large family, trying to get by and fulfill her potential. At age sixteen, one of the groomsmen at Wendy’s wedding asks her how it feels to be one of four sisters. “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape,” Liza replies. “A marathon of instability and hair products.” Grace is the baby, alternately petted and dismissed by her older, wiser, boisterous sisters. As an adult, she finds herself living an enormous lie in an effort to please her parents and acquire a normal life.
What is a normal life? The protagonists all grapple to define themselves in relation to this nebulous concept. Grace believes that her college-graduate peers have passed her by, ensconced in new jobs and pair-bonding. Liza lies in bed at dawn and wonders ‘how much of seemingly normal adult life was simply approximation, effort, good acting.” Even dad David questions his idyllic bourgeois surroundings in comparison to the hard-scrabble realities of his blue-collar roots.
Ms. Lombardo unabashedly votes for the family as the final arbiters of normalcy. If you love and support each other enough, then any other definition of normal becomes irrelevant. The Most Fun We Ever Had, ironic through the title may seem to be, also sums up the author’s ultimate message: as long as we have each other, these are, indeed, the good old days.

Susan Pearlstein is a Pittsburgh attorney who volunteers at the Carnegie Free Library of Swissvale. suemejp@gmail.com

Thoroughly enjoyed this engrossing family saga which portrays the Sorensons and their four grown daughters who are each struggling in their adult lives. The daughters see their parents love and marriage as perfection making their own relationships difficult to compare. However, the story includes flashbacks to the early years of the marriage and cracks in the relationship emerge. Both humorous and heartbreaking at times, this novel insightfully displays the emotional complexity of family dynamics with richly drawn characters.

The Most Fun We Ever Had was an extremely slow read for me. Though I was fascinated by the complexity of the characters, and intrigued by the premise, I cant say I was particularly riveted by this novel. It's definitely multi-generational as advertised. I really had to pay attention to the timeframes as the story moved about in time, and that got quite complicated. I do have to say that I felt compelled to follow the characters and see how everything turned out. The amount of detail made it inconvenient to skim, The Most Fun We Ever Had became a book I would take frequent breaks from, which didnt help the flow for me.
I think this novel will appeal to readers who are looking for story and substance on a large scale. There are a lot of discussion and debate opportunities. I expect it to become a book discussion selection staple. 3.5
I received my copy through NetGalley under no obligation.

I started reading The Most Fun We Ever Had, and was immersed right away into the lives of the Sorenson family. I loved how the story opened and we first get to see the love between Chicago couple Marilyn and David, the matriarch and patriarch of the family tree, and their four daughters.

Little by little we get to meet each of the four daughters, from eldest Wendy, to baby Gracie, and I am once again reminded at how much I love a novel with rich family dynamics.

Spanning over the years from the 1970’s to 2016, this book takes you through the ups and downs of marriage, parenthood, friendship, trust, lies, adolescence, infidelity, resentment, joy, affection, love and at the true center, sisterhood.

*Thank you netgalley and DoubleDay books for this free ebook in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own

I loved this book! It took me some time to get through as I’d read it in short spurts before bed. However, while on a flight from Portland to the Midwest I got the chunk of time I needed to sink into this book, and was sad when it ended! Above all, I felt like the author captured adult sisters really well! The characters felt real, and the story was interesting enough to elevate it from a portrayal of believable characters to something that keeps you invested! Recommended to you if you like multigenerational family sagas. Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for the e-copy in exchange for my honest review!

I love family centered stories. The main characters were the family members of the Sorenson family and we had secrets, loyalty, regrets, and reconciliation as supporting roles.

This multigenerational novel hops between time and POV's. We see the beginning origins of the family Marilyn and David create, how it was created, and how it was almost all lost.

We learn about the bonds all four daughters have, and the bonds that are strained.

At times, I felt as if I was imposing on their family by reading about them. The writing was so beautiful that I felt all the love, disappointment, and at times resentment the characters were feeling.

Marilyn and David are married and have four daughters - Wendy. Violet, Liza and Grace. When we first meet the Sorensons, all four daughters are grown and out of the house. Each of them has their own struggles, but when 15 year old Jonah arrives on the scene, things really ramp up. Jonah is the son Violet gave up for adoption when he was born. As he tries to figure out this new family of his, we get to do the same.

Each of the daughters think their parents have a marriage that is free of turmoil and has been nothing but smooth sailing. But in chapters related to Marilyn and David's relationship through the years, we find out that this is not necessarily the case.

It was fun spending time with the Sorenson's. At first I thought - man, this family is wacko. But in all honesty. they are probably not that much different than most families. It was interesting to see how they play off one and other, sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad. Ah yes - family - isn't it wonderful?!

My thanks to Doubleday and Netgalley.