Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #398516 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-19
• Released on: 2006-09-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

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.

From The New Yorker
The eponymous children in this satirical novel are actually adults who, chafing at the burdens of parenthood, try to re-create their unencumbered youth. Sarah, an overeducated young homemaker, likens her tantrum-prone daughter to a "brooding Russian epileptic" out of Dostoevsky, and pines for lost college days of feminism and bisexuality. While her husband orders used panties online, she has furtive sex with a stay-at-home dad whose repeated failure to pass the bar has earned him the contempt of his gorgeous wife. The humor is sometimes cruel, but Perrotta never betrays the complexity of his characters. For all Sarah's sins—neglecting her child, wallowing in romantic delusions—there's something almost brave about her refusal to join the supermoms drilling their toddlers with dreams of Harvard, and about her yearning for more than "a painfully ordinary life."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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

Customer Reviews

an excellent entertaining author writes a tired and predictable novel.
I bought this book used for $1. I'm glad I paid this much for it because while it was very mildly entertaining it had the tiresome plot of rich/middle class white mostly heterosexual people in suburbia having affairs and the plot does go on like a soap opera or like a full season of Desperate Housewives but the book's themes have been covered A LOT before, way too much in my opinion. While this book is supposed to be satire Perrotta isn't that good at writing satire about the suburbs or about rich/middle class heterosexuals.

I like Perrotta's other novels but this one is a big waste of time and totally predictable.

I also agree with the people who wrote about how Perrotta's characters are way too flat and we don't know enough about them and towards the end we learn more about minor characters in the novel who we should have learned more about in the beginning of the novel.

*****SPOILER ALERT***** DO NOT READ PAST THIS POINT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR THE ENDING!





Also the book just ends, out of nowhere. I didn't care about any of the characters or feel sorry, or happy for any of them and two of the main characters who were having an affair were planning to run off and get married or at least stay together as paramours and Todd doesn't show up because he falls while trying to ride a skateboard. How lame of an ending? Also both main characters know where they both live so it's not like they're complete strangers or they'd never see each other again ever.

Also Sarah's husband who goes to San Diego to meet with Slutty Kay/Carla they go out to dinner the day after having sex on the beach and you never hear if they wind up together or if Richard joins the adult entertainment industry.

The pedophile character was totally predictable and so was the ex cop. It would have been better if they hadn't been flat cookie cutter characters that we've all seen before.

Perverts are people, too
The only reason this book is garnering more than a one-star review from me is for its readability. I actually got into the story (in spite of the disgusting pornographic references--a man breathing into a woman's used panties? Gross!), but felt let down at the end, feeling the events were leading up to a grand finale, but the conclusion was very anticlimactic.

Basically, Todd (the hunky, but pansy stay-at-home dad--not saying stay-at-home dads are prissy, look at Todd Palin, but this one was) staying with his wife just because she's good in the sack, well, need I say more? And how sexist is it that his wife, Kathy, who knows about his affair with Sarah (which only begins because of one kiss--seems like anything will get this guy going), basically prostitutes herself to hold on to her cowboy (or more like would-be-lawyer turned cop). Idiotic.

I felt my intelligence was insulted by reading this, and it's obvious it was written by one of those far-left loons in Massachusetts (I know I'll get negative points for this assessment), but it was obvious what with the whole unnecessary lesbian fling thrown in, the child molester being painted as just an average joe six-pack, the cop accidentally shooting the kid (who just happens to be black--gee, it was an accident, a tragic one, cops are human, too, doggonit, but he really did think the kid had a gun on him and if so many black people didn't commit violent crimes (more unhelpful votes here), maybe he wouldn't have been so anxious) and whose against the child molester being in his neighborhood, the existence of God being mocked, the Christian Mary Ann being painted as a real *itch, Sarah standing up for the sick freak who abuses children in a way that murders their innocence, the use of the term "c*ck", ugh!

It wasn't very believable how all of a sudden, Sarah realized that running away with Todd wasn't the answer to her happiness. It didn't seem like she even enjoyed being a mother and there was Richard, her husband, whining about how his grown daughters from his first marriage took his money, but didn't want anything to do with him, well, can you blame them? He wanted to have them aborted and it's his responsibility to care for them until they turn eighteen. Should have kept it in your pants, pal.

This book was really just too much. I don't think you'll get anything out of it. I am really in the wrong business when rubbish like this not only sells, but gets so many good reviews, and is given a movie deal.

Dreary, squalid tale of uninteresting people
Reading "Little Children", I couldn't help but think of John D. MacDonald, who would've written this kind of story in a couple of weeks--and done a much better job.

I wish I could've enjoyed this novel more, but the characters (or caricatures) just aren't very interesting, and there is no real protagonist.

Instead, we get a routine tale of love and adultery in the suburbs, with a paroled child molester thrown into the mix. Too bad he wasn't a mad bomber; he might've blown up the whole group on page 9 and saved the readers a lot of wasted time.