The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

5 Stars

Or Easter, as the case was here.

In all honesty, I picked this one up because I kept getting it confused with A Good Neighborhood due to the cover similarities. I didn’t read a synopsis for either, just noted that my friends gave both pretty high ratings and added them to the TBR in hopes that I would eventually be able to tell them apart.

I started The Most Fun We Ever Had on Good Friday knowing that I would probably have loads of free time for reading because despite the “office” (a/k/a my reading chair) being open, most of the courts, the stock market, etc. were closed so there probably would not be high demands for work that needed to be done.

This is the story of the Sorenson family. David and Marilyn, their four daughters Wendy, Violet, Liza and Grace, the daughter’s husbands and boyfriends, their grandchildren – the whole gang. The kick-off to the book is a “re-storking” of sorts when Jonah, a family secret given up for adoption 15 years prior, makes a sudden reappearance in the family. The ever popular timehop device is then utilized to complete the narrative, taking us back to the 1970s when David and Marilyn first met and continuing via the back-and-forth past-to-present until the story is complete.

First things first, this one isn’t going to be for everyone, so please take my rating with a grain of salt. If you are looking for a book with a lot of twists and turns and edge of your seat excitement, this is not for you. It also has a lot of pages, so there’s a solid chance if you don’t find yourself connected to these people it will be quite a slog to get through. I was completely invested in the Sorensons, however, so I loved every second I got to be a part of their lives. Maybe it was because I come from a similar large Catholic family. Maybe it was because I love ensemble casts. Maybe it was because these characters seemed so authentic and I loved them one second and wanted to tear their hair out the next. A biiiiiiiiig maybe that it was full of humor rather than tragedy. Whatever the case, this was exactly what I needed on a weekend that would have surely brought out some family drama (either in my own or that I ended up hearing about someone else’s) if history hadn’t been rewritten due to the ‘Ronee.