At a Glance
- Genre: Contemporary literary fiction; multigenerational family saga
- Setting: Chicago and its suburbs; late 1970s to 2016
- Perspective: Rotating close third person across family members; dual timeline
- Tone: Wry, tender, incisive
Opening Hook
A marriage that looks mythic from the outside. Four sisters who know exactly how to hurt—and heal—one another. A boy from the past who walks through the door and tilts the family’s center of gravity. Claire Lombardo’s debut wraps all of it in a story that’s as biting as it is bighearted, turning the daily mess of kinship into a riveting portrait of love that survives its own illusions.
Plot Overview
Act I: Present Day, 2016 — The Fault Lines After four decades together, Marilyn Sorenson and David Sorenson seem to embody effortless, enduring love—an ideal their daughters both worship and resent. The daughters’ lives, however, are quietly fraying. The eldest, Wendy Sorenson, is a wealthy widow whose caustic humor barely covers grief. Violet Sorenson-Lowell, outwardly flawless in a suburban idyll with her husband and two sons, guards a secret that keeps her on high alert. Liza Sorenson, a psychology professor, discovers she’s pregnant while her long-term partner wrestles with severe depression. And Grace Sorenson, fresh out of college, is lying about law school as she drifts and doubts her place in the family.
Act II: The Catalyst — Jonah Arrives On a lark she calls “genealogical curiosity,” Wendy tracks down Jonah Bendt, the teenage son Violet relinquished in college and never told her parents or sisters about. At a reunion lunch—detailed in the Chapter 1-5 Summary—Violet panics and flees, leaving Jonah (orphaned young and shuffled through foster care) on the verge of being returned to a group home. Impulsive, guilty, and aching for purpose, Wendy takes him in. Jonah’s presence destabilizes the fragile equilibrium, bringing buried truths and old rivalries into the open.
Act III: The Past — Building and Breaking the Myth Interwoven flashbacks follow Marilyn and David from their charged first meeting in 1975 through residency-era money trouble, unplanned pregnancies, and career sacrifices that their daughters never fully saw. The portrait that emerges complicates the family myth: a marriage sustained by devotion and grit, not magic. These chapters underline the novel’s inquiry into The Ideal vs. Reality of Love and Marriage: what looks effortless from a distance is, up close, the product of compromise, doubt, and choice.
Act IV: Implosion and After As Jonah unsettles Violet’s carefully controlled life, her marriage strains under the weight of the past. Liza’s pregnancy pushes her and Ryan apart before it lets them reconceive what partnership could be. Grace’s lies collapse, isolating her until confession becomes a lifeline. When Marilyn and David finally learn the truth about Jonah, the revelation forces them to re-evaluate their own history and how their daughters learned to love and conceal. The confrontations are bruising but clarifying: resentments aired, loyalties tested, and tenderness rediscovered. By the closing family gathering, Jonah has begun to belong, and the Sorensons—no longer pretending perfection—choose to stay with one another in all their chaos.
Central Characters
For a full roster and deeper dives, see the Character Overview.
Marilyn Sorenson The luminous center of the family, Marilyn is a brilliant woman who once set aside academic ambitions for motherhood. Her certainty about her marriage and her children is shaken by the secrets they’ve kept, but she reasserts herself as the family’s moral weather vane—steady, exacting, and, ultimately, forgiving.
David Sorenson A devoted physician and romantic to the bone, David defines himself by his love for Marilyn and the home they built. Retirement and revelation force him to parent adult daughters rather than little girls, expanding his tenderness into honesty and boundary-setting.
Wendy Sorenson Widowed and wickedly funny, Wendy uses money and bravado to shield raw grief. Taking in Jonah begins as a reaction—control, mischief, atonement—but becomes genuine attachment. Through him, she starts to metabolize the losses of her husband, Miles Eisenberg, and their stillborn daughter, and to soften without losing her bite.
Violet Sorenson-Lowell Composed, high-achieving, and clenched, Violet has built a life designed to erase her most consequential choice. Jonah’s return forces her to integrate past and present. Her arc is a slow unmasking: relinquishing control, renegotiating marriage, and allowing herself to be both a mother and the person she became without him.
Liza Sorenson Perpetually overlooked, Liza is the family’s keen observer, a clinician in life as well as work. Pregnancy and a partner’s depression push her into instability that becomes opportunity: she learns to claim her needs, define her motherhood, and reimagine partnership on healthier terms.
Grace Sorenson The baby of the family, Grace performs competence while feeling lost. When the law-school lie collapses, she chooses truth over performance, beginning to craft an adult identity supported—but not scripted—by her parents and sisters.
Jonah Bendt Quiet and flinty from years of instability, Jonah upends the Sorenson story simply by existing. As he cautiously accepts their unruly affection, he catalyzes sharper honesty in each of them and, in turn, finds the first real version of home.
Major Themes
For broader context and related motifs, see the Theme Overview.
The Complexity of Family and Sisterhood The Complexity of Family and Sisterhood powers the novel’s engine: alliances shift, old roles resurface, and intimacy coexists with rivalry. Lombardo shows how siblings shape one another’s identities—how love among sisters is as much about friction as it is about fierce loyalty.
The Ideal vs. The Reality of Love and Marriage The daughters idolize their parents’ union, only to discover that what they revered was a selective memory. By juxtaposing past and present, the novel argues that lasting love is built from unglamorous choices—work schedules, money scares, deferred dreams—rather than grand gestures, and that seeing those seams can deepen rather than diminish devotion.
Secrets and Their Consequences Secrets and Their Consequences drive the plot and test every relationship. Violet’s hidden pregnancy radiates outward for years, and the family’s habit of protective silence proves corrosive. Yet the novel insists that revelation, while painful, is the precondition for genuine connection.
“How could you grow people inside your own body, sprout them from your own extant materials, and suddenly be unable to recognize them?”
Literary Significance
The Most Fun We Ever Had revitalizes the big American family novel with a modern eye for psychology and a comic-tragic ear for dialogue. In the lineage of Franzen and Tyler, Lombardo compresses cultural change—gender roles, work-life tradeoffs, curated perfection—into the intimate theater of one household. A bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick, the novel drew acclaim for its capacious structure, crisp wit, and characters who feel lived-in down to their worst impulses. Its achievement lies in making the Sorensons’ particularities feel universal: it’s a story about the stories families tell, the damage those myths can do, and the sturdier love that can emerge once the myth is gone. For memorable lines that distill its bite and warmth, see notable Quotes.