The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo. Lets start with Wendy, the eldest daughter. This was quite a delightful debut. At 544 pages, you get to know them, along with their struggles and joys, pretty well. Last is Grace, the baby of the family. By Ehhhhh.. Why arent people writing great stories in fewer pages?! Hoover is one of the freshest voices in new-adult fiction, and her latest resonates with true emotion, unforgettable by I just don't like spoiled characters. Knopf Doubleday. Fast forward to present day, Wendy tracked down Jonah and found out that he needs a home. lot of improvement of the loot were (and for lot, are still) possible. This Study Guide consists of approximately 52pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - Thats interesting! Lombardo also has a prologue and an epilogue of sorts, entitled The Offspring and The Midst of Life respectively. Change). Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide whats next. We get it. Order our The Most Fun We Ever Had Study Guide, teaching or studying The Most Fun We Ever Had. Points for Lombardo, again. This isnt a fast read. Doubleday, 2019. At its core, The Most Fun We Ever Had isnt much more than an entertaining drama about four sisters and their futile competition to prove themselves most worthy of their picture-perfect parents- and each other. Shepherd is a community of 7,000+ authors sharing their favorite books with the world. Violet feels as though she is losing her husband Matt, and struggles to accept Jonah into their lives. by Claire Lombardo. Thanks! Very exciting!! I had this in a queue at my library but I may press on with others I want to read first! Extra points for Lombardo. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. Violet finally speaks to Wendy and learns that Jonah is in foster care as his adoptive parents died in an accident when he was young. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment. The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. As for the audiobook, the narration was decent or I would've dropped the audio even if I had nothing else to listen to. Lombardo wrote a fabulous book about family dynamics that was completely enthralling. This book makes you feel emotions you never knew you had. We had lots of flashbacks and secrets that didn't get revealed till later on in the plot but the flashbacks were just too many to my liking. The present storyline contains most of what we . Completing the quartet is the recently tenured professor Liza, whose own crumbling relationship is constantly falling short of David and Marilyns union. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sisters wedding. This big, chewy, multi-generational tale rings so true, handles multiple characters so deftly, and moves back and. I really enjoy books with different perspectives and this one definitely satisfied all of my perspective needs. Shepherd is a community of 7,000+ authors sharing their favorite books with the world. As the novel moves through the single tumultuous year following the arrival of Jonah Bendt given up in a closed adoptions by one of the daughters fifteen years before we are shown the rich and varied tapestry of the Sorensons past: years marred by troubled adolescence, infidelity and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile. The other long book is 900+ pages, so the short titles were definitely a relief this year. Enough loss to break anybody, but Wendy has overcome her obstacles and continues to overcome by living every day. It will reel you in and not let you go from the moment you read the first word till the last; Lombardo's powerful depiction of her characters, of . Unless the takeaway is that we shouldnt present our children with the model of a solid marriage for fear of setting the bar too high, theres little substance to take back to the real world after closing the back cover. [This review contains spoilers - heads up!] EX-FENCING COACH AND HARVARD PARENT ACQUITTED OF BRIBERY CHARGES. It reads, eventually, as a deliberate and fascinating commentary on how a particular kind of moneyed white family can choose the degree to which they engage with such unpleasantries. Your email address will not be published. Pages may include moderate to heavy amount of notes and highlighting, but the text is not obscured or unreadable. In Part Four, Winter, Violet continues to struggle to accept Jonah. So if youre looking for your next read, pick this one! For me, they were a bunch of pretentious rich people with little love for each other (again the kids). The "shining unfathomable orb of their parents, two people who emanated more love than it seemed like the universe would sanction," sets a powerful but daunting example for the couple's children. This is how Lombardo pulls at your heart strings. Lombardo's writing is so elegant - she makes our most complex and fragmented feelings tangible, which is a very rare skill. The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Lombardo, Claire. . Not only do I get to read about the perspective of one sister, I get to read about the thoughts and emotions of all three sisters, their parents AND Jonah. But she secretly got along much better with Chris thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. The main action of this notably apolitical, all-white, all-straight novel takes place over four seasons, beginning in the spring of 2016 which finds just about every member of the Sorenson family in turmoil. At the age of 20, Wendy marries Miles, a man 15 years her senior who comes from old money, to escape her family and her eating disorder. I could see glimpses of myself in Marilyn and that was one of the main reasons why I continued turning the pages. Their social lives and societal awareness are essentially nonexistent; even the characters jobs exist only as places where they might meet a potential marital interloper. As the work closes, David and Marilyn find contentment and comfort in one another as they marvel at the brood they have created, out of their extraordinary and enduring love. This book gives you a behind the scenes look into this familys life and I was so grateful for it because most times we leave books wanting more information. I think there are actually some similarities to Fleishman in this book, especially with characterization and marriage commentary, so Im not sure youd enjoy this one much! share. To be honest, I was intimidated by the length, but when a friend assured me it doesn't drag and that Lombardo's authorial voice is gold, I picked it right up and read it in three days (and it's a 500-pager, so that's saying something!). More Circe By Madeline Miller Don't Threaten. (LogOut/ I always find those relationships so interesting to read about, which was definitely the highlight of this book for me. We already have a strong community, but this event brought us even closer as we cheered and grinded it out next to each other! When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that awaits them. Oh, jeez. I can't say enough how much I couldn't stand Wendy especially followed by Violet. THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD by Claire Lombardo RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019 Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt. Get help and learn more about the design. I made a little list in my longlist wrap-up last year of parallels that I found between the books- Ill link that here in case youre curious! By 2016, they have four radically different daughters, each in a state of unrest. I dont have a sister, myself. Still, it was indeed very readable! But Ridges lingering feelings for Maggie cause heartache for all three of them. I found the dynamics between characters highly entertaining and enjoyed the writing, but even so I think Lombardo couldve shaved off two hundred pages without losing anything crucial. The two begin a songwriting partnership that grows into something more once Sydney dumps Hunter and decides to crash with Ridge and his two roommates while she gets back on her feet. The Most Fun We Ever Had is certainly not boring. i definitely agree with you in that it wasnt anything groundbreaking; when i was reading it i felt like it was the same as pretty much every other story out there about fairly privileged dysfunctional suburban families. It also leads to Lombardo's heartwarming takeaway: "If this family had taught him anything it was that people could get mad at each other and then make up again. Page edges may . Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. David recovers, but fears his mortality. Alicia Berenson's life is seemingly perfect. The novel is absolutely a pleasant and enjoyable read, but is in no way gritty.. I think of Grace as the color gray. Grace confesses her lie and returns home to live with Marilyn and David while she contemplates her next move. From here, the narration jumps ahead sixteen years to follow a years worth of family drama, divided into seasonal sections. Its definitely an interesting story, but not a perfect one. Archived. Though it doesnt seem like much fun theyre considerate and selfish in equal measure, they do things for one another without mentioning it and then stab one another in the back its theirs. Ahhhh, I see. Yes, Violet was not my favorite character, but I appreciated how Lombardo portrayed her because it made me feel. RELEASE DATE: Dec. 10, 2019. Next up is Violet, unassuming and mild. Sixteen years later, the already messy lives of the sisters are thrown into turmoil . Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. Briefly, I didn't enjoy this book nor do I recommend it. I also have a brother and though were close, I find sister relationships (at least the way theyre portrayed in books) to be an entirely different thing. April 15, 2000. A multigenerational novel in which the four adult daughters of a Chicago couple--still madly in love after forty years--recklessly ignite old rivalries until a long-buried secret threatens to shatter the lives they've built. [ Claire Lombardo describes how she arrived at the Iowa Writers Workshop with a very messy, 813-page draft. ]. And I have to agree on sister relationships seeming very different than brother-sister ones; I dont have the strongest of sibling bonds, but even in childhood when my brothers and I got along better it was NOTHING like sisterhood is generally portrayed. ( Reading Goldfinch was not challenge, it was long and all those amazing sentences needed to absorb slowly like sipping a cold, splendid, special drink which burns down your throat and awakens all your senses! Lombardo shows how menial things can be misinterpreted resulting in decades of bad blood. She was just trying to do the right thing, but that wasnt so easy, because everyone in her life had a different conception of what the right thing was, and she herself was caught somewhere in the middle.. I was confused at first, too! This time were looking at Claire Lombardos The Most Fun We Ever Had, one of the largest books on the list at over 500 pages. Liza gets pregnant and appears to follow in Violets footsteps. Gingko leaves and trees show up many times during the course of the novelduring the opening scene and when David and Marilyn first fall in love, just to name a couple. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. The quartet is the recently tenured professor Liza, whose own crumbling relationship is constantly falling of... 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