The Most Fun We Ever Had Summary: Sorenson Family Saga
TL;DR: The Sorenson Briefing
A fifteen-year-old boy arrives in Chicago with a name nobody in his biological family has spoken aloud in years.
His existence belongs to Violet Sorenson, a corporate lawyer who gave him up for adoption at birth and built an orderly life on top of that silence.
Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had follows the Sorenson family across four decades, from Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson’s courtship in 1975 Chicago to the tangled present of their four adult daughters.
The novel moves between Oak Park, Hyde Park, Iowa City, and Portland, tracing how one marriage shapes everyone born inside it.
Readers drawn to multi-generational family dramas, domestic literary fiction, and stories built around sibling dynamics and long-kept secrets will find the book’s structure and subject matter relevant to their interests.
- Central event: Violet’s relinquished son, Jonah, resurfaces at fifteen and is absorbed into the family he never knew.
- Structure: A dual timeline jumping between the parents’ past and a compressed 2016ā2017 present.
- Recurring concerns: adoption, stillbirth, depression, marital strain, sibling rivalry, and the cost of maintaining a flawless exterior.
- Ending: A medical crisis, a cross-country runaway, and a December gathering that leaves the family intact but altered.
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Who’s Who in the Sorenson Household
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Marilyn Connolly Sorenson | Matriarch of the family; owner of Mallory’s Hardware in Oak Park and wife of David. |
| Dr. David Sorenson | Patriarch; a physician who has been married to Marilyn since 1977. |
| Wendy Sorenson Eisenberg | Eldest daughter; widow of Miles Eisenberg and the person who locates Jonah. |
| Violet Sorenson Danforth | Second daughter; former corporate litigator and Jonah’s biological mother. |
| Liza Sorenson | Third daughter; psychology professor at UIC living with her partner Ryan. |
| Grace Sorenson | Youngest daughter; living in Portland, Oregon under false pretenses. |
| Jonah Bendt | Violet’s biological son, placed for adoption in 2001 and later raised in foster care. |
| Miles Eisenberg | Wendy’s late husband; an economics professor fifteen years her senior. |
| Matt Danforth | Violet’s husband; a corporate law partner and father of Wyatt and Eli. |
| Ryan | Liza’s long-term partner, who is experiencing severe depression. |
| Ben Barnes | Grace’s love interest in Portland. |
| Dr. Gillian Levin | A colleague of David’s from the mid-1990s. |
| Hanna and Terrence | Jonah’s foster parents in Oak Park. |
| Wyatt and Eli Danforth | Violet and Matt’s young sons. |
| Kathryn Elizabeth “Kit” | Liza’s newborn daughter. |
| Ivy Marilyn Eisenberg | Wendy and Miles’s stillborn daughter, born in 2005. |
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The Most Fun We Ever Had Summary: The Full Story
Spoiler warning: the following section describes the plot, including the ending.
Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson meet in 1975 as undergraduates at the UIC Circle Campus in Chicago. Both lost their mothers young, and both carry that grief into a relationship that moves quickly toward permanence.
When David is accepted to medical school at the University of Iowa, Marilyn leaves college and moves with him to Iowa City. They marry in 1977.
Their first daughter, Wendy, is born in 1978, followed eleven months later by Violet ā the two are Irish twins. Marilyn finds early motherhood exhausting and identity-erasing while David balances residency with family life.
After Marilyn’s father dies in 1984, the family returns to Oak Park and into Marilyn’s childhood home on Fair Oaks. Marilyn buys and runs Mallory’s Hardware. Liza arrives next, and then Grace, whom David calls “the Epilogue.”
Wendy grows up volatile and sharp-tongued, cycling through eating disorders and academic rebellion. In 1998 she moves to Hyde Park and falls in love with her economics professor, Miles Eisenberg, fifteen years her senior. They marry in her parents’ backyard in 2000.
Violet takes the opposite path: disciplined, high-achieving, headed for law school. In 2000, shortly after graduating college, she discovers she is pregnant by an ex-boyfriend named Rob.
Unwilling to disappoint her family, Violet invents a gap year in Paris. She actually spends the pregnancy hidden in Wendy and Miles’s Hyde Park brownstone.
In January 2001 she gives birth to a boy and surrenders him for closed adoption. She resumes her life as though nothing occurred, later becoming a corporate litigator and marrying fellow lawyer Matt Danforth. They have two sons, Wyatt and Eli.
In 2005 Wendy goes into premature labor and delivers a stillborn daughter, Ivy Marilyn. Violet, consumed by unresolved feelings about her own relinquished child, does not come to the hospital. The rift between the sisters lasts years.
Miles is diagnosed with renal cancer and dies in 2014, leaving Wendy a wealthy, grieving widow at thirty-six. She manages the loss with alcohol, sarcasm, and casual encounters.
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Years earlier, in the mid-1990s, David had formed an emotional attachment to Dr. Gillian Levin, an OB-GYN colleague. Marilyn discovered the late-night dinners, banished him from their bedroom for a time, took up secret smoking, and eventually reconciled with him.
Jonah, meanwhile, is adopted by a loving couple named the Danforths. When he is thirteen, his adoptive parents are killed in a car crash. He enters the Illinois foster care system, moving through group homes including Lathrop House before landing with a foster mother named Hanna.
In spring 2016, Wendy hires a private investigator and tracks down Violet’s son. She stages a surprise meeting between Violet and fifteen-year-old Jonah at a West Loop restaurant.
Violet panics. She refuses to bring Jonah into her Evanston home, so Wendy installs him in her River North condo instead.
The secret collapses. Violet confesses the adoption to David and Marilyn, who insist on welcoming Jonah into the Fair Oaks house as his primary guardians. The arrival exposes the fault lines running through all four sisters.
Violet begins suffering panic attacks and grows estranged from Matt, who resents how her past has entered their sons’ lives. Wendy keeps drinking heavily and takes home younger men while serving as Jonah’s fiercest defender.
Liza, thirty-four and living with Ryan, learns she is pregnant. Ryan is in the grip of an existential depression that keeps him in bed and out of work. Overwhelmed, Liza has a brief encounter with an older colleague, Marcus Spear, ends it, and navigates the pregnancy through a temporary separation from Ryan.
Grace, twenty-three, has spent nearly a year lying to her family from Portland. She claims to be enrolled in law school and taking European trips while actually working a low-wage office job in a meager apartment and quietly fixating on a man named Ben Barnes.
Jonah settles slowly into the Sorenson ecosystem, bonding with David over home repairs and with Ryan over video games. During a pre-Christmas visit to Violet’s house, he tells six-year-old Wyatt that Santa Claus is not real. Violet erupts and orders him out.
Shortly afterward, David is trimming branches on the ailing ginkgo tree in the Fair Oaks backyard when he suffers a massive heart attack and falls from the ladder. Jonah witnesses the collapse and calls for help.
In David’s desk, Jonah finds an envelope addressed to him containing birthday money. Convinced he caused the heart attack, he steals David’s Jeep and drives away.
He crosses the country to Portland and appears briefly at Grace’s apartment. Grace recognizes that her fabricated life cannot hold and confesses the law school lie to Wendy before returning to Oak Park.
Jonah keeps driving toward Canada but is pulled over in Montana for a broken taillight and detained for lacking a license or ID. Wendy flies out, bails him out, and drives him back to Illinois in the Jeep. The two form a lasting bond on the road.
David survives, undergoing bypass surgery and rehabilitation. His brush with death pushes the family toward repair.
He takes a leave of absence to care for Liza’s newborn daughter, Kit, finding unexpected joy in infant care while Liza and Ryan begin rebuilding their relationship. Violet apologizes to Jonah on a park bench and opens her heart to him, making peace with Wendy in the process.
Grace abandons her fabrications, moves home to Oak Park, takes a paralegal job at Matt’s firm, and pursues an honest relationship with Ben. David and Marilyn hire arborists to remove the dying ginkgo tree.
Eight months later, in December 2017, the extended family gathers at Fair Oaks for their traditional Second Thanksgiving. The four sisters bicker fondly over high school memories while the men watch football and Wyatt, Eli, and Jonah play Hungry Hungry Hippos on the floor.
Jonah is now woven into the family. Marilyn and David step onto the back porch in the cold December air and look through the glass at their noisy, imperfect children and grandchildren.
They embrace on the creaking wooden stairs, content in the life they have built together.
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Claire Lombardo: A Debut Decades in the Making
Claire Lombardo grew up in the Chicago suburbs, a background that shapes the Oak Park setting and the family geography of her debut.
She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she developed the manuscript that became The Most Fun We Ever Had.
The novel was published in 2021 and selected as a Reese’s Book Club pick, bringing a 640-page family saga to a wide readership. It reached bestseller lists and has drawn more than thirty-two thousand customer ratings on Amazon.
What the Novel Examines
| Theme | How the Book Presents It |
|---|---|
| Marital love versus parental love | Marilyn and David’s marriage absorbs the family’s attention across four decades, and each daughter measures her own relationships against it. |
| Secrets, shame, and trauma | Violet hides a pregnancy and adoption for fifteen years, Grace fabricates a law career, and David conceals the extent of his connection to Gillian Levin. |
| Sisterhood and rivalry | Wendy and Violet stop speaking for years after Ivy’s stillbirth, while Liza and Grace occupy separate orbits within the same family. |
| Motherhood, grief, and loss | The narrative covers unplanned pregnancy, adoption relinquishment, stillbirth, single parenting, and the death of a spouse. |
| Perfection and control | Characters who engineer orderly lives ā Violet above all ā confront events that cannot be managed or predicted. |
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Inside the Book’s Design
- Genre & Subgenre: Literary Fiction / Family Saga / Contemporary Domestic Drama
- Core Narrative Tropes: Irish twins, secret child and adoption reunion, dual timelines, suburban secrets, four-sister dynamics
- Tone & Atmosphere: Bittersweet, observant, witty, domestic, emotionally weighted
- Primary Conflict: The tension between polished family facades and the messy realities behind them, triggered by Jonah’s return
- Pacing Style: Character-driven, non-linear, alternating between the parents’ past (1975ā2014) and a condensed present (2016ā2017)
- Book Structure: A prologue titled The Offspring, 34 numbered chapters across four seasonal parts (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter), and an epilogue titled The Midst of Life
- ISBN: 978-0525564232 (ISBN-10: 0525564233)
- Pages: 640
- Author Background: Claire Lombardo grew up outside Chicago and earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; this is her debut novel.
Books Like The Most Fun We Ever Had
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett: A multi-generational saga about step-siblings and a single romantic decision that reverberates across five decades.
Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane: A suburban domestic drama following two neighboring families through secrets, mental illness, and forgiveness over thirty years.
The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney: Four adult siblings in New York navigate personal failures and complicated bonds while quarreling over an inheritance.
Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney Sullivan: Two Irish immigrant sisters in Boston are bound together by a secret pregnancy and a child given away.
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner: A long marriage and a decades-long friendship between two academic couples form the spine of this quiet, time-spanning novel.
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett: A brother and sister remain tethered to each other and to a family house across fifty years of changing fortune.
Quotes from The Most Fun We Ever Had
“I just love being a mom. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had.”
“…each of their four daughters paused what she was doing in order to watch them, the shining unfathomable orb of their parents, two people who emanated more love than it seemed like the universe would sanction.”
“You’ve never disappointed me,” her mother said, eyes fluttering open. “If you’re unhappy with how things are, then IāI’m sorry for that, and I wish you felt differently, but you’ve never been disappointing. Not ever.”
“Everything’s so miserable, and we’re all just a bunch of giant narcissistic babies wandering around pretending we know what the fuck we’re doing.”
“Jonah? There is nothing on this earth that would be made better by your not being around. Please set fire to that thought immediately. Run it over with a stolen car.”
“I think we allow ourselves to hurt the people we love the most because we know they won’t abandon us.”
“…to find people beyond your people was nothing short of miraculous, finding a person away from home who felt like home and shifted, subsequently, the very notion of home, widening its borders.”
