This author might just fill the gaps for me between Ann Tyler books! I mean no disrespect in this - I LOVE Ann Tyler and I think Ms Lombado brings something new to a genre that Ann Tyler has made her own - the american family novel. I found this book really enjoyable, thought provoking and beautifully written. Love you for that ARC netgalley - ta very much!

David and Marilyn Sorensen have four daughters, and are very happily married. In fact, they love each other so much it impacts negatively on their daughters. Nothing can ever compete with their love. The relationships between the sisters is complicated to begin with, and then Wendy, the eldest, hurls a bomb into the family.
Wendy has tracked down the son that her sister Violet gave up for adoption when she was young. Violet now has a supposedly perfect life with a rich husband and two young children. She cannot cope with the appearance of her teenage son, and he is bounced around the Sorenson family like a hot potato. Liza is an academic, married to a useless depressive. Grace, the youngest, is lost, and ends up hiding for most of the novel after telling a lie under pressure.
The Most Fun We Ever Had is a very impressive and expansive family story made up of real, complicated, people. It is a joy.

This book is the story of the Sorenson family - told over several decades. David and Marilyn meet in the seventies and fall in love and go on to have four daughters - Wendy, Violet, Liza and Grace. Their story is told throughout the book.
It’s a story of a family and their life and all that happens to them. I enjoyed the way the story was laid out - following the different characters in a vaguely chronological order.
The characters were well developed and I felt I could identify with some whilst being irritated by others - which is what happens in life.
The way the author writes is reminiscent of Anne Tyler, which is always a good thing. The book was long but kept me engaged throughout and I could have read more.
I look forward to future offerings by this fine author.

This was great. A real joy. One of those books you’re just happy to keep turning the pages as the writing so good. Fell in love with the family. Felt I was reading a more contemporary and commercial Anne Tyler and it was joy.

he Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo is a beautiful character driven novel about four sisters; Wendy, Violet, Liza, Grace and their parents, David and Marilyn. It is a big, sweeping novel which spans generations, taking us back in time to when David and Marilyn met, onward to each of the four girls being born and brings us to the present day when they are fully grown and making their way in the world.

Wendy, the eldest is widowed, brash yet brittle and has a personality which leaps from the page. Violet is an emotionally closed high flyer who is a mother of two young children and married to an equally successful high flyer. Liza is successful in her field, is in a relationship with a depressed man who hasn’t worked in a while and when she finds herself pregnant she feels a door to escape closing. The youngest, Grace, or Goose as the family call her, has left Chicago to go to College, but all is not as it seems and she is desperately, desperately unhappy.

This is a book about everything and nothing all at once. It explores the small incremental ways that relationships work both between sisters and between a parent and child. There are astute observations of Marilyn and David’s roles with their daughters which differs depending upon the child veering from concern to quiet confidence in their decisions. The one constant is that no matter the child or their age, both parents worry about their happiness.

I was drawn most of all to the portrayal of sisterly relationships being one of two sisters myself. The eldest, Wendy and Violet are Irish twins with Violet’s birth taking place within a year of Wendy’s. This closeness in age creates a tight bond between the two and it is a heady, complicated relationship which is at times an uncomfortable read. It is perfectly executed though and Claire Lombardo’s eye for the complexity of sibling relationship took my breath away.

…the only portrait you could ever get, really, of one sister from another, tinged inevitably with jealousy and double standards and affection as deep and intractable as marrow

Violet had a secret child that she gave up for adoption 15 years earlier and it is Wendy who brings him back into their lives. This forms the crux of the book and we follow the Sorenson family as Jonah is dropped into their lives and watch as the ripples become tides.

At the heart of it all is the relationship between Marilyn and David which the girls see as a benchmark and what they should aspire to achieve, finding themselves constantly falling short. Told in multi-person narrative we are privy to the characters innermost thoughts and feelings and so we see how a marriage works, its ebbs and flows, the valleys and mountains. The shifting perspectives and time-frames allow us to see the perception of their marriage amongst their family and we watch as the love they have for each other eclipses everything else. It casts a long shadow inadvertently making their daughters feel like failures, a theme which runs throughout the book in a heartbreaking way.

I really enjoyed how Claire Lombardo plays with the narrative structure and uses shifting time frames and perspectives to cast new light on events. Our alliance, sympathies and emotions are challenged and alter incrementally as we come to understand the Sorenson family. It is very cleverly done and brilliantly handled allowing the reader to become heavily invested in the characters. I love a book which jump around and has a lot of different voices especially when it is done as well as this.

It is a big book which comes in at 544 pages and is absorbing and meandering which, despite its length is a quick read. I couldn’t put it down and was fully immersed in the world, unable to stop thinking about it when it wasn’t in my hand. It is an emotional read of quiet power and there were moments which took my breath away in this sprawling and epic book.

2019 has been a strong year for beautiful, lyrical and contemporary explorations of relationships and The Most Fun We Ever Had is up there as one of the best. A contender for my book of the year, I’ll be thinking about it for a long time to come.

A book that engages you from the very beginning. It flashes between both the last and present. The characters are both likeable and well written.
An enjoyable read.
Recommended read.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Orion Publishing Group for my eARC of this book in exchange for my honest unbiased review

The Most Fun We Ever Had is a book about the Sorenson family - David, Marylin and their four daughters. This is an engaging story which goes between the past and the present. It is a lengthy book but the story will draw you In. I found myself picking this up at every opportunity and then realised I had finished it in no time at all! The characters are complex, the book is slow going in places but you can't help but be immersed into the life of this family. Beautifully written and very well structured. An enjoyable read.

Thank you to Orion Publishing Group, the author and Netgalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is an engaging novel I couldn't put down. It's enthralling, well written and you cannot help rooting for the characters.
I loved how the author developed the characters and their relationship, the plot full of emotions.
I look forward to reading other books by this author.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

The Most Fun We Ever Had tells the story of David and Marilyn, a couple deeply in love after decades together raising their four children, Wendy, Violet, Liza and Grace. The children grow into women who have been blessed with parents whose love has only intensified while they struggle to find lasting happiness in their own relationships.

Although I initially found this book slow going, I am glad a persevered. I found it moving and relatable and I empathise with the characters as they experienced traumas and triumphs.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free e-copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This was a perfect summer book!
It's a story of a family. The parents meet early in their lives, fell in love and marry. They remain in love for a long time to come, have 4 daughters together. So, the book covers the relationships among all these family members.

I thought it was quite a positive, upbeat book with a charm. I really loved reading and being in this family's life. There were surprises every now and then which added some spice to the food, and I enjoyed my time a lot.

Thanks a lot to the publisher and NetGalley fot this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a seductive, engaging novel. Over 500 pages and I read it in four sittings. It doesn’t happen very often. Claire Lombardo really impressed me, hard to believe The Most Fun We Ever Had is her first novel.

Set in Chicago, The Most Fun We Ever Had is about the Sorenson family, David and Marylin and their four daughters, Wendy, Violet, Liza and Grace. The narrative starts with Wendy’s wedding in 2000 and moves between the past and the present taking in the major events that shaped the characters and their relationships with each other. Underpinning everything is the enduring love David and Marylin feel for each other and how it affects their offspring.

The family relationships are beautifully drawn up, dysfunctional, resentful, messy but also loving and tender. Intimate, sarcastic and funny at times, sad and moving at others, it’s a very well realised portrait of navigating life both as an individual and as a sister, daughter, mother, father.

Definitely an author to watch.

My thanks to Orion and Netgalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy of The Most Fun We Ever Had.

The story of a family set mostly in the affluent suburbs of Chicago - the parents meet at college and remain very much in love over the next four decades while raising four daughters. We follow their highs and lows, births, marriages and deaths, the narrative sliding backward and forward in time and between the perspectives of the various characters. The structure and pacing are perfect, hints of future events kept me interested and there are more than a few surprises thrown in that made me reconsider previous events.

As grandmother to a family of four girls myself, I was especially taken with the situations of the girls in the hierarchy: the eldest two close in age and forging the way, the overlooked middle child and the much younger perpetual baby (the ‘afterthought’ or ‘epilogue’ as she is described by her parents). Much of their personalities and behaviour are shaped by this, and also by their parents and their very apparent love affair. They find it challenging to live up to their parents’ example in their own lives.

It took me some time to fix the different girls in my mind, not least because we don’t see much of them outside family interactions. It is their behaviour within the family dynamic that is the focus here, not their professional or social lives - but I felt the tiniest bit cheated. A small niggle as I enjoyed this saga very much, despite its daunting page count.

Every time I had to stop reading this novel I felt like I wanted to get straight back to it. Lombardo nails the complex relationship between sisters perfectly.