- Hardcover: 368 pages
- Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (Mar 19 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312315716
- ISBN-13: 978-0312315719
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 14 x 3.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 522 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (70 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #667,045 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
The characters in this intelligent, absorbing tale of suburban angst are constrained and defined by their relationship to children. There's Sarah, an erstwhile bisexual feminist who finds herself an unhappy mother and wife to a branding consultant addicted to Internet porn. There's Todd, a handsome ex-jock and stay-at-home dad known to neighborhood housewives as the Prom King, who finds in house-husbandry and reveries about his teenage glory days a comforting alternative to his wife's demands that he pass the bar and get on with a law career. There's Mary Ann, an uptight supermom who schedules sex with her husband every Tuesday at nine and already has her well-drilled four-year-old on the inside track to Harvard. And there's Ronnie, a pedophile whose return from prison throws the school district into an uproar, and his mother, May, who still harbors hopes that her son will turn out well after all. In the midst of this universe of mild to fulminating family dysfunction, Sarah and Todd drift into an affair that recaptures the passion of adolescence, that fleeting liminal period of freedom and possibility between the dutiful rigidities of childhood and parenthood. Perrotta (Election; Joe College; etc.) views his characters with a funny, acute and sympathetic eye, using the well-observed antics of preschoolers as a telling backdrop to their parents' botched transitions into adulthood. Once again, he proves himself an expert at exploring the roiling psychological depths beneath the placid surface of suburbia.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Perrotta sent up the foibles of high-schoolers in Election (1998) and of Ivy Leaguers in Joe College (2000). Here, in warmly humorous prose, he takes on the thirtysomething parents of young children. Handsome stay-at-home dad Todd, dubbed the Prom King by the moms at the playground, secretly grooves to Raffi and loves staging horrific train wrecks with his young son; he has flunked the bar exam twice and can sense his wife's increasing exasperation, but he can't force himself to study. Although Sarah has a Ph.D. in feminist studies, she is completely flummoxed by her toddler's temper tantrums and her husband's seeming infatuation with a pornographic Web site. Sarah and Todd fall into an unlikely affair, and although they know they are acting out of desperation to escape problems on the home front, their relationship is full of electric sex and genuine emotion. Perrotta, with a light but sure hand, expertly sketches the angst of the playground set and then amps up his material with a subplot involving a child molester. A fast-reading, wholly engaging novel. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
THE YOUNG MOTHERS WERE TELLING EACH OTHER HOW TIRED they were. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
THE YOUNG MOTHERS WERE TELLING EACH OTHER HOW TIRED they were. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
We are all Little Children Trying to Get Through Life,
By
This review is from: Little Children: A Novel (Paperback)
Often if I see a movie I really like Ill read the book, which is what happened with Little Children. The movie sticks quite closely to the book except for the ending, which I wont give away here. Tom Perrotta was really able to get into the heads of his characters, even the females. In fact, if you didnt know who wrote the book, you may think a woman wrote it. I found this very refreshing. Perrotta was able to weave all the characters and subplots together smoothly and capture the modern, mundane suburban middle-class existence well. This is the first Tom Perrotta book I have read, but it certainly wont be the last!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perrota changes direction -- and delivers again!,
By Sharon Turner (Towson, MD) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Little Children: A Novel (Paperback)
This time around, Perrotta takes satirical aim at the stifling confinement of suburban middle-class existence. Perrota's male characters are lost, utterly bewildered as to how they've landed in their unremarkable lives, saddled with spouses and mortgages and children. Having drifted, almost involuntarily, into adulthood, they suddenly snap awake, and begin a dismayed accounting of their lives, all facing the same choice: do they resign themselves to the lifelong tedium of the roles outlined for them by society, or risk the censure of family and friends by abandoning the façade of responsible adulthood and striking out alone after individual happiness? Perrotta's characters are likable and, on a modest scale, tragic; from Sarah's halfhearted forays into being a strong-minded, independent feminist to Mary Ann's hard-won Martha Stewart perfection, their very natures are what will dictate the course of their lives and their inevitable discontent. LITTLE CHILDREN is certainly a pleasure to read, with all of the sly humor and deft observation that Perrotta does so well. Whether it's the subtle jockeying for power among playground mothers, or the threadbare, joyless sexual relationship between long-married spouses, his prose is sparkling and clever. Surrounded by abundance and prosperity, free from any real hardship, the characters must invent reasons to be unhappy in order to give their lives dramatic shape; deliberating over which playground to take their children to, or which fruit juice is really the healthiest, only points up the futility and insignificance of their existence. There's plenty of inherent irony in the self-important, status-obsessed suburban lifestyle, and Perrotta mines it to the fullest - if you didn't know better, you might think the author himself had done time among backyard BBQs and afternoon play dates. This is a terrific read -- don't hesitate to pick up a copy! Also recommended: THE LOSERS CLUB: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez -- another wonderfully engaging, funny -- albeit obscure -- Amazon quick-pick. THE LOSERS CLUB and LITTLE CHILDREN -- are definitely my favorite two purchases this year.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Big Babies,
By Catfish_Hunter (Oak Park, Il) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Little Children: A Novel (Hardcover)
After reading many reviews touting Perrotta's brilliant writing in this book, I must say I am sorely disappointed with it. The characters, as other readers have pointed out, are hardly likeable (the only one I had any feelings at all for was the child molester, the best developed character in my opinion), but if the book had been better that might not have mattered to me as much. As it was, I found myself skimming through the unbearablly long football scenes and predictable plot line that made up the last third of the book. For my money, a better, certainly more entertaining look at similar (though admittedly not the same) people can be found in "The Nanny Diaries."
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