"Everything about this brilliant debut cuts deep: the humor, the wisdom, the pathos.
In painting this luminous portrait of a family\'s becoming, Lombardo.
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.
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 fifteen 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.
Above it all, the daughters share the lingering fear that they will nEver find a love quite like their parents\'.
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.
When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that\'s to come.
Claire Lombardo writes like she\'s been doing it for a hundred years, and like she\'s been alive for a thousand." --Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers A dazzling, multigenerational novel in which the four adult daughters of a Chicago couple--still madly in love after forty years--recklessly ignite old rivalries until a long-buried secret threatens to shatter the lives they\'ve built. "Everything about this brilliant debut cuts deep: the humor, the wisdom, the pathos
