Claire Lombardo · 2019 · Novel
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Claire Lombardo’s debut novel follows the Sorensons, a family in the Chicago area. David and Marilyn fell in love in the 1970s and remain devoted to each other, a marriage their four adult daughters both admire and resent. By 2016, each daughter is unsettled. Wendy, widowed young, is drinking and drifting; Violet, a lawyer turned stay-at-home mother, battles anxiety; Liza, a newly tenured academic, faces an unplanned pregnancy; and Grace, the youngest, is hiding the truth about her life.
The arrival of Jonah, a teenage boy placed for adoption by one of the sisters fifteen years earlier, disturbs the family’s fragile balance. Moving between that year and decades of family history, the long novel explores marriage, sibling rivalry and the ways parental love shapes children.
Key insights
- A strong parental marriage can be both gift and burden; the daughters measure their own relationships against an ideal they struggle to match.
- Siblings raised in one house can have very different childhoods, shaped by birth order, timing and how much attention each received.
- Secrets kept to protect a family often cost more when they surface; old decisions keep rippling into the present.
- Lasting love is shown as effort rather than luck; flashbacks reveal the strains, doubts and resentments behind the parents’ apparent ease.
- Family love is not the absence of conflict; the novel suggests it lies in continuing to show up for one another despite it.
Read it if you enjoy long, absorbing family sagas about marriage, sisters and the secrets that shape them.