In her debut novel, "The Most Fun We Ever Had,"Claire Lombardo flawlessly imagines the decades-long tale of the Sorenson family. Lombardo, a recent graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, begins her novel at the genesis of Marilyn and David's romance during the 1970s.

At the time, neither one knows that their love will span decades and shape their lives for years to come. Set in Oak Park, Illinois, the novel transcends past and present as it allows readers a peek into a year in the lives of not only Marilyn and David, but also their four adult children: Wendy, Violet, Liza, and Grace.

In the present time, the novel encompasses an especially challenging year for each daughter, and also the Sorenson family as a whole. Wendy — who is still reeling from the stillbirth of her daughter and cancer-death of her husband — chooses to mask her pain by meddling in the comparatively stable life of her younger sister, Violet.

Violet, having hidden from her family the existence of the illegitimate son she put up for adoption for the last fifteen years, is dumbfounded when she arrives for a lunch date with Wendy and finds Jonah at the table as well. What ensues is a year of Violet grappling with the anger she feels toward Wendy, as well as the discomfort she's experiencing in the wake of Jonah's reappearance.

Meanwhile, Liza finds herself in the midst of unwanted pregnancy with a man she hasn't loved in a very long time. When Jonah accidentally reveals that Liza has been cheating on her boyfriend, her world is shaken to the core.

At the same time, the youngest Sorenson, Grace, is hiding out in Oregon, having lied to her family about being accepted to law school.

Throughout the novel, each daughter harbors the fear that they will never experience a great and everlasting love like that of their parents. Still, while Marilyn and David's relationship may seem idyllic to the four daughters, Lombardo does an excellent job of portraying the sacrifices Marilyn must make for her daughters as she struggles, both past and present, to once again find meaning in her life outside motherhood.

Always swept away by her all-encompassing devotion to David, Marilyn has spent the last forty years searching for the person she was before she met him — an English major, a free spirit, a dreamer.

In her debut novel, Lombardo manages to completely enrapture her readers with her prose, attention to detail, and meticulous storytelling. She succeeds in intertwining the perspectives of her numerous characters so that all who read her novel to feel close to them in a way that doesn't often occur. "The Most Fun We Ever Had" presents the intricacies of a family against the backdrop of an idyllic, firmly middle-class suburb, demonstrating that even the most perfect of families have struggles, ghosts, and times they wish to forget.

This novel perfectly encapsulates the underbelly of suburban paradise, the dissatisfaction of domesticity, and the way that, in the end, the overwhelming love of family can pull someone through the worst of times. Tanya Hall once said that convincing a person to read a novel is not just convincing them to spend twenty dollars, it is convincing them to give up two weeks of their time — and in the case of "The Most Fun We Ever Had," I would happily give up much longer than that.