Read by Emily Rankin
20 hours, 33 minutes
Published June 2019 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publisher's Summary:
When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that's to come. By 2016, their four radically different daughters are each in a state of unrest: Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator-turned-stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt when the darkest part of her past resurfaces; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. Above it all, the daughters share the lingering fear that they will never find a love quite like their parents'.
As the novel moves through the tumultuous year following the arrival of Jonah Bendt — given up by one of the daughters in a closed adoption 15 years before — we are shown the rich and varied tapestry of the Sorensons' past: years marred by adolescence, infidelity, and resentment but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.
Spanning nearly half a century, and set against the quintessential American backdrop of Chicago and its prospering suburbs, Lombardo's debut explores the triumphs and burdens of love, the fraught tethers of parenthood and sisterhood, and the baffling mixture of affection, abhorrence, resistance, and submission we feel for those closest to us.
My Thoughts:
Twenty hours is a really, really long time to expect readers to pay attention. Also, a really, really long time if you've checked the audiobook out from the library and only have 14 days to listen to it. A week in I decided I needed to pick up the speed...turned it to 125%. Two days later, I turned it to 150%. I'm not really sure I missed anything by doing that. To be fair, if you're telling a story that spans forty or so years, I suppose it shouldn't be all compacted into 200 pages. Certainly there are really long books that I have fallen into and hardly noticed that they were hundreds of pages longer than most books. This wasn't, unfortunately, one of those for me.
One reviewer on Goodreads (fatma) said, "a family saga is only as good as its family." They need not care for this one at all (surprised they gave the book even two stars) and had a lot of good reasons but one of them was a lack of caring about any of the characters. Which made me realize that, honestly, I didn't care about any of them, either. At first I thought my big issue was that every single person in this family has major issues. I mean, yes, we all have our issues. But not like this family. But after I read fatma's review, I realized that not only did the issues bother me, the way the characters dealt with them, they way they dealt with each other's problems, really made me dislike most of them. Still, you also know that I can find a character unlikable and still love their story.
Let's just break that down, shall we?
Oh, let's don't. It's not that I entirely hated the book. I just think it could have been better. Better human beings, less book, and way fewer things that made reading it uncomfortable. Multiple times people walk in on others having sex, Lombardo uses the R word more than once, mental illness is treated as a burden for those living with those who actually are suffering. Why didn't an editor suggest that some of these things needed to be cleaned up, made right? There's a good book in here - the story of a couple who meet in college and stay together and remain in love for decades, the story of four sisters and the ways in which they diverge and come together, the story of a young man who falls through the cracks in the system only to finally have a loving family.
This one does have an almost four-star rating on Goodreads so maybe don't just take my opinion (or fatma's!). Others clearly really enjoyed it and you might, too.
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