The Most Fun We Ever Had

The four adult daughters of a Chicago couple, who are still wildly in love after forty years, recklessly rekindle old rivalries in this intergenerational tale until a long-forgotten truth threatens to destroy the life they have established.

Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson are blissfully unaware of all that's ahead when they fall in love in the 1970s. By 2016, all four of their very diverse daughters are experiencing discontent: Wendy, a young widow, turns to alcohol and younger men for solace; Violet, a former litigator who is now a stay-at-home mother, struggles with anxiety and self-doubt when the darkest aspect of her past resurfaces; Liza, a neurotic and recently tenured professor, becomes pregnant by a man she isn't sure she loves; and Grace, the youngest daughter who is slow to get married, starts living a lie that no one in her family knows about. Above all, the girls' persistent worry is that they will never experience love quite like that of their parents.

We are shown the rich and varied tapestry of the Sorensons' past as the novel moves through the turbulent year that follows the arrival of Jonah Bendt—given up by one of the daughters in a closed adoption fifteen years earlier—years marred by adolescence, infidelity, and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.