The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
By 2016, their four radically different daughters are 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; 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.
With the arrival of Jonah Bendt--a child placed for adoption by one of the daughters fifteen years before--the Sorensons will be forced to reckon with the rich and varied tapestry of their past: years marred by adolescent angst, infidelity, and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.
Review: The Sorenson family consists of mother Marilyn and father David and their four very different daughters: Wendy who was widowed young and turned to alcohol and casual hookups to number her pain, Violet, an anxious lawyer who is now a stay at home mom to two young boys, Liza, a tenured professor stuck in a relationship with a man crippled by a mental health issues and pregnant with an unplanned baby, and Grace, the much younger baby of the family who is struggling to find her path and fears disappointing her loving parents.
This novel was such an interesting character study of a complex, family dynamic. I thought it was particularly interesting that Lombardo chose to make the parents a very loving couple - so loving in fact that they worry they have loved each other to the exclusion of their daughters. But at the same time, despite the intensity of the love, their marriage isn't perfect and is often marred by uncertainty and unhappiness.
I listened to the audio of this and at first had a hard time untangling who was who because the relatively large cast of family characters were all introduced at once. Each of the sisters has their own troubles, no one was perfect, but they seem to pull closer together by the end of the novel. I did think this was longer than it needed to be at 21 hours audio/640 pages print. It dragged somewhat for me and sections of it could have been cut or at least trimmed down. I thought other versions with the ginko leaves on the front cover felt particularly apt for this book, as the father David frets over the ginko tree in the yard of their family home, which has inexplicably sickened despite his tender fretting over it, a perfect metaphor for his bevy of daughters.
I was interesting that I read this close on the heels of Ann Napolitano's Hello Beautiful because both focus on the dynamics of a family of four daughters. Over time, the layers of interactions between all the members of the family become so ingrained and difficult to escape set roles or past, instinctive reactions.
Stars: 4
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