Search - Little Children

This book inspired me to start a bookclub. There were so many important themes and issues in the text that I needed to be able to discuss it with my friends. My husband read it also- and he never reads my books. The movie is wonderful as well, but it holds not a candle to the book! Must read!

I thought this was a great book. I was pleasantly surprised - I could not put it down. The author used unfiltered thought processes to develop his characters so well, that even if you believed that the character was nothing like you, you could still relate to what they were going through with similar emotions. They seemed real - you got in their heads. He even got the female thought processes on target and gave me insights on how a male thinks. Even if you do not think you would like the story, you should check out his writing style when you get an opportunity.

Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet than with the flesh and blood in his own house; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out, down to scheduling a weekly roll in the hay with her husband, every Tuesday at 9pm.

They all raise their kids in the kind of sleepy American suburb where nothing ever seems to happen-at least until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two restless parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could have imagined. Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with all the fluency and dark humor of Perrotta's previous novels, Little Children exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground.

GREAT BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!! I couldnt put it down!!!!!!!! youll love it

I enjoyed this book from start to finish. It was a very entertaining read. You really got to know all the different characters involved. I was hoping for the fairytale ending, but instead it was more realistic of what would happen in the real world. Overall, I am glad I read this book. It was good.

This is a chilling mystery!

An absorbing, fleshed-out portrait of an American male edging toward adulthood by crossing seemingly rigid social boundaries.

Perrotta gives you real characters who are memorable and their lives in disarray. A great modern novel.

Very different.

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.

Haven't read; received by mistake from book club. *sigh*