A long quiet stretch with a family novel to settle into

For the weeks when the house is finally quiet, the kettle is on and there is time for something long and absorbing. This is a family novel in a 640 page paperback, following four sisters and their parents from the 1970s to 2016, and it offers a full household to spend time with, flaws and tenderness both.

The Most Fun We Ever Had is a novel by Claire Lombardo, published by Vintage in paperback in April 2021, running 640 pages. It begins with Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson, who fall in love in the 1970s with no idea what their life together will ask of them. By 2016 they have four daughters, very different from one another and each unsettled in a separate way. Wendy was widowed young and copes with drink and younger men. Violet left litigation to stay home with her children and battles anxiety and self doubt. Liza, newly tenured as a professor, is pregnant and unsure about both the baby and the man. Grace, the youngest, has started living a lie that nobody in the family suspects.

The book moves between the parents’ early years and the daughters’ present. The arrival of Jonah Bendt, whom one of the daughters placed for adoption fifteen years earlier, pushes the family to look back at what it has carried: adolescent turmoil, infidelity, resentment, and the rivalries that sisters keep for life. By the reviews, Lombardo’s method is close attention to ordinary moments and inner lives. Ruth Reichl, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said the everyday stretches become fascinating, and The New York Times Book Review described a quiet subversion of the traditional family saga. The book also leaves room for joy, and NPR called its view of family tender.

This suits a reader who likes to be settled into a household and kept there. It tends to matter to people old enough to see their own parents as people with a history, or those raising children while still working out where they stand with their siblings. Someone who has been the dependable one, the difficult one or the one with a private secret may find a sister to recognize. It is a poorer fit if you want a brisk plot or a book to finish in a weekend, and a family with this much friction will not be to everyone’s taste.

As a read, it is long, it moves back and forth in time, and it follows several people closely, so it rewards an unhurried pace and a stretch of quiet evenings. The Wall Street Journal pointed to its mix of comedy and pathos, and Jane Smiley in the Washington Post called it ambitious. It was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, chosen as a Reese’s Book Club pick, and listed as a New York Times bestseller. Those are facts about its reception, not a measure of whether it will suit you. That part is taste.

Madeline Miller’s praise names a messy, loving family, and that seems a fair summary of what waits here. It is a crowded, imperfect household you can visit for a few weeks, in a house of your own that stays calm around it, and leave with the sense that the hard years and the good days belong to the same story.