Book Club Recap: The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
When I chose this book for our July book club session, I wasn’t aware it was 500+ pages long. Good thing I wasn’t, because its length would have probably dissuaded me from choosing it. But I picked it, and we read it, and boy am I glad we did.
So much to learn from this talented young author! Let’s dive in!
Structure
The Most Fun We Ever Had is a family saga that spans decades and closely follows multiple POV characters. The story centers around a couple (David and Marilyn) from when they met toward their golden years, and each of their four very different daughters.
The story is divided into two storylines. The present storyline contains most of what we would consider plot. It begins when the teenage child of one of the daughters who had secretly given him up for adoption, makes his way back into this family’s life. From then on, the present storyline unfolds over a year (divided into seasons: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter) and follows each member of this family as they reckon with Jonah’s return and their own issues.
The past storyline, which alternates with the present storyline on chapter-to-chapter basis, starts with David and Marilyn meeting, getting married, conceiving and birthing each of their daughters… until this storyline finally merges with the present day one. The past storyline serves to shine the light onto how this family came to be the way it is.
The present storyline is divided into seasons (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and another section titled Midst of Life), thus breaking the narrative into five different parts. As we discussed the reasoning behind this, we agreed that it was helpful to have the book broken down not only in chapters but in bigger sections as well. This is a very long book (over 500 pages in print, and over 600 pages on Kindle), and the reader needs some sense of reprieve and achievement once in a while. This division in parts doesn’t seem rooted so much in the story itself; it seems to be more of an editorial decision, than the authorial one.
All in all, this structure is perfectly suited for the story it contains. It gives us a sense of progression in the present storyline, while allowing the past thread to illuminate the context of what’s going on in the present, showing the depth and origin of all the relationships that are affected by Jonah’s return.
Narrative Drive
From the moment the reader hits the first page, they’re trying to glean what this book is about. What type of story is this? What kind of journey can they expect? What is, in other words, the main story question—the question that is there from the beginning of the story, and is answered in its end.
The simpler the book is in its structure and execution, the easier it is to discern this. In most commercial books, the reader can glean the main story question within the first few pages, or even by just reading the blurb; (for example, in An Unfinished Story by Boo Walker, you know from the story premise that the main question is if the widowed wife will get over her grief and get together with the writer). The story question is usually posed in a straightforward, obvious way.
In Literary Fiction, the author has some more leeway in terms of when and how the main story question is posed.
It took awhile to figure out that the main story question here is—how does a picture-perfect marriage affect the kids? Can the kids ever live up to a nearly impossible standard the love between their parents set for them? This becomes completely obvious when Wendy says to her mother:
”We’re all emotionally stunted because you and Dad love each other more than you love us (…) It’s not necessarily a bad thing (…) I’d rather be fucked up because my parents are hot for each other than because they’re, like, keeping me chained to a bike rack overnight and feeding me raw oats. But you have to admit that there’s a gradient of preference.
Or, as one of the other daughters, Liza, put it:
“We all desperately want your life … and we all know we’ll never have it.”
This is, in fact, the point the book is making, the theme it’s primarily exploring: that it’s not only having bad parents that stunts children; having great parents can stunt their kids in a similar way.
From this premise, the author goes on to ask all sorts of other questions: can a mother ever do right by all her children? How come that the kids always end up resenting their Dad (who was away most of the time for work) less than they end up resenting their mother, who, ironically put her whole life on hold for them? Is sibling rivalry—especially among sisters—something that can never be overcome? How can it be that the same parents raise such different children? And conversely, do siblings ever really have the same parents?
So with the story question taking so long to really become obvious, how did the author hook us?
In the opening scene (which is, in fact, Wendy’s wedding scene), you immediately get a sense of turmoil in this family. Marilyn is avoiding both her daughters and her husband; Grace is fumbling to get noticed by anyone; Liza is making out with the groomsman; Wendy is basting in the fact that she got to marry such a rich, classy man, despite her past (which we know nothing about as of yet); and Violet is imagining going over to her blisfully happy older sister and telling her “You’d die if you knew where I was last night.” It is precisely this last sentence that hooked our members the most.
From then on, we move into the present storyline which kicks off by Wendy tricking Violet into meeting the kid she long ago gave up for (closed) adoption, thus reintroducing the kid into their family’s life.
(It’s worth noting that it’s not until the end of the book that we realize why Wendy really did this. At first, she gives a perfectly plausible explanation—she’s an impulsive person, and she acted on a whim, and she found the kid, and then it turned out the kid’s adoptive parents have died and he’s without appropriate care. Knowing Wendy’s character, we believe this otherwise flimsy explanation, but as the book progresses and we learn of the depth of Wendy’s disappointment in Violet, and Violet’s big betrayal that ended up with Jonah’s existence (You’d die if you knew where I was last night.) we understand that Wendy’s looking Jonah up wasn’t at all coincidental, it was aimed at upheaving Violet’s perfect life. It was, in fact, a “sister prank,” a display of sibling rivalry in a relationship that always vacillates between love and resentment).
I guess this is a longer way of saying that sometimes the main story question isn’t posed in a straightforward way, especially in literary fiction. It can be crafted slowly, touched on from different seemingly disconnected angles, until it starts crystalizing in the reader’s head. Readers of literary fiction will normally allow the author more leeway in this sense than readers of commercial fiction.
Writing multiple POVs
Deciding who gets to be a POV character in a book (and who doesn’t) is often something writers struggle with. How many is too many? Who should get a voice and who shouldn’t? In Lombardo’s book all the members of Sorenson family get to speak—which results in seven different POVs (David, Marilyn, Wendy, Violet, Liza, Grace, Jonah).
The starting point of deciding on POVs should always be figuring out who the protagonist is/are. By defining your protagonist, you are deciding inevitably to give this person a voice. Once you’ve determined that, you have to figure out if there is another person whose POV could shed a different light onto that protagonist’s story? A character whose particular POV could inform us about something the protagonist can’t inform us about, give the story an edge the protagonist can’t offer, a new insight, a different take…
However, there are books where the protagonist isn’t a particular character (person) in the book. In many love stories, for instance, the romantic relationship is the real protagonist and it is brought to life by two lovers who each offer their POV. Sometimes, a setting can be the real protagonist, and its story is brought to life by different POV characters who interact with that setting in different ways. In Lombardo’s book, the Sorenson family is the real protagonist (the ‘whole’ of this family is certainly more than the sum of its parts; the real phenomenon we’re exploring in this book isn’t any of the POV characters’ individual stories, we’re hearing individual stories so that they can paint a picture of this invisible, voiceless entity that is the whole Sorenson family).
By hearing all their different stories, how different people see and experience things in disparate ways, slowly emerges the story of the whole—the dynamics and rhythm of this family, which is the focus of this book.
As for the technical details of how the author switches from one POV to the other, here are some things we’ve noticed.
Switching POVs between different family members is established early on—in the first chapter. Of course, there’s an inherent risk to this approach, as the readers might find switching between multiple characters a bit confusing early on (before they’ve gotten a chance to get familiar with all the different family members), but there’s no other way around it. (This approach is very similar to another book we’ve read, Ann Napolitano’s Dear Edward, where in the first chapter the author does quite a lot of head hopping, thus establishing different POVs. At first, the effect is jarring, but as you get familiar with different POVs, in retrospect you realize the first chapter couldn’t have been written in any other way).
From first chapter on, each chapter contains multiple scenes; and each scene belongs to a different POV character. So it is clear from the very beginning that you will get to hear from multiple characters in any given chapter.
Whenever the author switches between different POVs, she does her best to tell us straight away which family member we’re following. The way she does this is by either stating their names, or their role in the family (for instance, if the scene opens with ”His wife always…” then you know it’s David’s POV, because David and Marilyn are the only characters the author refers to as ‘her husband’ and ‘his wife;’ or the author will signal us with something (a setting that’s typical for a certain character, a detail that’s particular to a certain character) to show us who is speaking. For instance, if the scene starts with a glass of alcohol in her hand, you know immediately it’s Wendy, because she’s the one who drinks heavily.
In other words, the rules of switching between these different POVs are set early on and are consistend throughout the book (the reader catches onto those types of rules in a book quickly), and the execution is very clear to the reader (at the beginning of any particular scene, the author clarifies—one way or the other—who’s the POV character).
Internal monologue
If anything is done flawlessly in this book—it’s internal monologue. Six different POVs, and yet you feel so familar with every single one of them. By the end of the book you know these people: what makes them tick, what annoys them, what they most long for, what frustrates them…
The train of thought just flows, seamlessly like it does in real life. And—just like in real life—you never know where it will lead you. For instance, Wendy will be making out with a young guy, and a seemingly random word (‘kid’) will remind her of her parents, and she will suddenly have tears in her eyes, because she is still grieving, two years after losing her husband Miles, who was to her what Marilyn and David are to each other, and she heard you were supposed to be feeling better after a year. Then she consoles herself with the fact that she can’t possibly be the only one still grieving for a loved one after two years.
If someone had asked you in the beginning of this scene (making out with they younger guy), to predict how the scene will end or what the takeaway will be, I bet this would be the last thing on their mind.
The internal monologue is both unpredictable, but also inevitable; because, of course that Wendy would be thinking just that. So this makes it feel very true-to-life, and it makes Wendy seem like a real person, not just a character made out of ink and paper.
Characters and caracterization
Characterization was a point of contention among our members. There were some members who didn’t particularly like the characters, and so they couldn’t really root for them. They felt that they were too self-absorbed, self-centered, and too flawed to be able to connect with them. Of all the characters, Violet was the one who people liked the least: which isn’t surprising given the fact that she keeps resisting accepting Jonah in her life, all the while crying over her own rather perfect, privileged life.
There are readers who need to like the characters so that they can root for them. If they don’t like the characters they’re reading about, they’ll not be compelled to read the book as they won’t care what happens to them. This is an inherent risk of writing flawed characters—you will inevitably lose some of the readership based on the fact that the readers can’t connect to them.
Personally, I don’t need to root for the characters I’m reading about, I only need to be curious about what will happen to them. And I was, at all times, because the author so deftly kept adding questions I needed answered (will Jonah fit into the family? Will Violet accept him? Who is his father? Does Wendy know who his father is?)
The upside of writing flawed characters, though, is that imperfections make them seem more real.
As an editor, one of the common issues I come across is writers trying to make their characters feel perfect, flawless, likable. The effect that has on the reader is often the opposite. Readers hate being spoonfed, so when someone is forcing them to think a character is good, perfect, likable, the readers will often—paradoxically—resist liking them. Perfect characters will often come across as whiny, or too good to be true, and readers will resist connecting with those types of characters just as much as they do with overly-flawed ones.
Striking a fine balance is very hard. It also depends on the style of writing you’re going for. In Commercial Fiction, the readers are less forgiving of flawed characters, whereas the Literary Fiction readership will give a bit more space for these nuances in characterization.
So, while Lombardo might not have stricken that fine balance for some of our members, most of us enjoyed exploring these different, less-than-perfect people.
When we broke down how we felt about each character, most of us agreed that Wendy was the most compelling character, and Violet the most disliked one. In execution, Wendy’s voice was most honed—you could immediately sense you’re in her POV just by the way she spoke. The reason most of us disliked Violet as much as we did was because she best illustrates one of the novel’s themes: privilege. Violet leads a privileged life—affluent background, suburban picture-perfect home, education, husband with a hefty income… and yet, all she does is complain about how hard it is for her—even to Jonah, whose life has gone off the rails pretty much because she gave him up for adoption so she could have that life of privilege.
The dynamics of a family is sometimes best observed from the outside. Jonah serves as a person who can give us an outside perspective on this family. As for his characterization, though, some members argued he didn’t have much agency, and that he didn’t seem to reflect the kind of trauma the kid bounced around in the system is sure to go through. It’s hard, though, to say that every foster kid has to be visibly stunted or otherwise they’re an unbelievable character. Maybe we can allow that there are some good-natured kids with calm demeanor who would go through foster experience in just this way?
Conclusion
Most of our members unequivocally loved this book—and even those who didn’t love it found that it was very well done in terms of structure and execution. It also fascinated us that such a young author produced a book with such deep insights into the very fabric of family, parenting, and sibling rivalry. This is masterful storytelling!
While it’s not the most emotional read we’ve had to date (like, for instance, Dear Edward, or Writers & Lovers) there were ‘truisms’ on almost every page—insights into family life that conveyed its very essence in brilliant and revealing ways. Lombardo writes amazing internal monologue, and her turn-of-phrase is fresh and original. For one, I was deeply engrossed in this book and didn’t want it to end, despite its length.
With that, I’ll wrap up this month’s book club recap! Hope you enjoyed reading! Until next time—keep safe and keep writing!
Lidija Hilje is a book coach, and the author of Slanting Towards the Sea, a novel forthcoming from SIMON & SCHUSTER in July 2025.
The book is available for pre-order on Barnes & Noble; Amazon; Books-A-Million; and Bookshop. You can also add on Goodreads.