RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleIn this darkly comic novel, Tom Perrotta reverses Tolstoy's famous dictum and suggests that all unhappy families are unhappy in the same way ...the unnamed Eastern suburb in which Little Children is set appears idyllic, a place where young couples go to work, run errands and raise kids as they plan happy, affluent futures in tidy first homes. But this bourgeois Eden is haunted by two serpents –– one external, one internal ... Subtler but more insidious is a weary dissatisfaction with their partners that frays the fabric of the young married couples' lives as moths waste a garment ... Perrotta's suburban comedy of mannerisms provides lively reading as long as he remains focused on Sarah, Todd and their prematurely frumpy milieu ... A more mature writer might have pulled it off, but Perrotta doesn't, and Little Children feels like two stories imperfectly grafted together, one darkly comic, the other merely dark.
