The Most Fun We Ever Had (Reese's Book Club Pick): A Novel

Another multigenerational family saga with buried secrets, shifting timelines, and the slow unraveling of what a family chose to hide.

If you loved The Most Fun We Ever Had and are searching for books like it, The God of the Woods delivers the same slow-burn pleasure of watching a family's carefully maintained facade crack under pressure. Liz Moore builds her story across decades, weaving between past and present to reveal how one family's secrets ripple forward into catastrophe. Like Lombardo's Sorensons, the Laceys appear enviable from the outside — wealthy, established, protected — but the novel's real subject is everything they buried to stay that way. Both books reward patient readers who enjoy psychological complexity over plot mechanics, and both use a large cast to show how the same wound looks different depending on who's carrying it. Perfect for readers asking 'what to read after The Most Fun We Ever Had' who want the same accumulative, character-driven payoff.

A literary bestseller driven by outsider identity, family abandonment, and secrets that surface years later — emotional depth over plot velocity.

Readers who were drawn to The Most Fun We Ever Had for its emotionally layered storytelling and its unflinching look at what families hide from each other will find a kindred spirit in Where the Crawdads Sing. Delia Owens builds her novel around a young woman who grows up abandoned, shaped entirely by absence and by the natural world she retreats into — themes of neglect, longing, and the long shadow of childhood map closely onto Lombardo's exploration of how parents and children wound each other without intending to. Both novels became cultural phenomena through word-of-mouth among readers who prioritize emotional resonance over twisty plotting. If you're looking for 'books like The Most Fun We Ever Had' that carry the same literary warmth and generational heartache, Crawdads is a natural next read.

A Reese's Book Club pick that digs into how childhood trauma quietly shapes adult life — tender, psychologically precise, and impossible to rush through.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine shares more with The Most Fun We Ever Had than just the Reese's Book Club stamp of approval. Both novels are fundamentally about the weight of the past — specifically, how early family dynamics and unresolved grief quietly govern everything a person does in adulthood, even when they appear to be functioning fine. Gail Honeyman's Eleanor carries wounds she can barely name, and the novel's power comes from slowly revealing what's underneath her brittle self-sufficiency. Lombardo does something similar with the Sorenson sisters, each of whom is managing a version of the same original loss. For readers who finished The Most Fun We Ever Had and are asking 'if you liked The Most Fun We Ever Had, try…', Eleanor Oliphant offers the same emotionally intelligent, slow-reveal approach to broken people learning to surface.

A long, psychologically rich novel about grief, identity, and the secrets we carry from childhood — rewards readers who give it their full attention.

If The Most Fun We Ever Had worked for you because you're the kind of reader who enjoys living inside a novel for weeks, The Goldfinch is the next book for you. Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is similarly expansive — over 700 pages — and similarly committed to tracing how a single traumatic rupture (the death of a parent, witnessed in childhood) radiates outward through an entire life. Both Tartt and Lombardo are writers of psychological accumulation: their books don't race toward revelations, they build them slowly, scene by scene, until the emotional weight becomes undeniable. Both also deal with class, Chicago-adjacent Midwestern ambition, family loyalty, and the ways people self-destruct quietly over years. For anyone searching for 'books like The Most Fun We Ever Had' that match its scale and seriousness, The Goldfinch is a perfect companion.

Braided timelines, a large ensemble, and the question of what survives when a world — or a family — falls apart. Literary fiction at its most architecturally satisfying.

Station Eleven and The Most Fun We Ever Had share a structural ambition that sets them apart from most contemporary literary fiction: both move fluidly across time, following multiple characters whose stories intersect in unexpected ways, building toward an emotional resolution that feels earned precisely because it took so long to arrive. Emily St. John Mandel's novel asks what art, love, and memory survive catastrophe — questions that echo Lombardo's quieter investigation of what a marriage and a family preserve across decades of strain. The ensemble is similarly large, the tone similarly bittersweet, and the satisfaction similarly accumulative. For readers who want to know 'what to read after The Most Fun We Ever Had' and are drawn to novels that trust the reader to hold many moving parts at once, Station Eleven is a richly rewarding follow-up.