The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

Summary

This novel brings us into the lives of the Sorenson family. The book mainly focuses on the husband and wife, Marylin and David, their 4 daughters and their eldest grandson. Marylin and David have had a seemingly perfect relationship. And it drives their daughters crazy. This family experiences its fair share of ups and downs, but through it all, they remain committed to each other.

Thoughts and Opinions

I felt that this story gave a very honest viewpoint of family dynamics in general. Marriage, parenthood, sisterhood and friendship don’t always come easy and this story does a good job at showing the hardships that we all face, and how to get through them. Not everyone likes everyone at all times, but in the end, they all love each other and that’s the glue that keeps it all together.

A reoccurring theme I picked up on was that no matter how great your childhood was you are still going to have to face struggles in life. I found this theme to be comforting on a few different levels. The Sorenson daughters were raised with a fair amount of privilege, yet they still had their own trials to face as adults. In fact, the perfect husband/wife/father/mother relationship is what gets in the way for each of the daughters at some point in time. Living up to this idealistic standard of a marriage that the daughters have seen their whole lives makes the hardships of their lives seem even more challenging.

We are told to never judge a book by its cover (something I am still completely guilty of doing) but in this case, I judged this book by its length. I typically read books that are around 350 pages, so to take on this whopping 544 page novel was a little intimidating. Low and behold about halfway into it I ended up devoting almost 20 hours of a weekend (including staying up into the wee hours of the morning) to finishing this book because I just couldn’t put it down.

Downfalls

As I mentioned the book is told from the perspective of each family member. At first, I was slightly confused by the character transitions. The book does not have clear-cut divisions of characters, instead of being divided by chapter or section, there are only defined line breaks that signal you are now reading someone else’s point of view. To add to the confusion, the story also jumps back in time often. That being said, after about 50 pages, you begin to know each character well enough to catch on to which person is telling the story.

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