Critical Praise

"darkly comic, with a mischievous eye for absurd and intimate detail…a virtuoso set."

——Washington Post

"Tom Perrotta's Little Children made me laugh so hard I had to put it down…an effervescent new work…a gentle, sparkling satire."

——Entertainment Weekly (3/1/04) featured main review

"With Little Children Perrotta has moved into the suburbs with a wrecking ball. He has cooked up recipes of depravity that would curl Betty Crocker's hair. If good satire can generate a corrective jolt, this may be a deadly shock."

——Christian Science Monitor

"Little Children will be Mr. Perrotta's breakthough popular hit…poignantly funny…What distinguishes it from run-of-the-mill suburban satire is its knowing blend of slyness and compassion."

——Janet Maslin, New York Times

"The cast is so real that book groups will have a blast comparing people they know to the ones in the book. Perrotta is that rare writer equally gifted at drawing people's emotional maps…and creating sidesplitting scenes.Suburban comedies don't come any sharper."

——People Magazine (3/15/04) main featured review

"What a wicked joy it is to welcome Little Children, Tom Perrotta's extraordinary novel…a sterling comic contribution…raises the question of how a writer can be so entertainingly vicious and yet so full of fellow feeling. Bracingly tender moments stud Perrotta's satire…at once suspenseful, ruefully funny and ultimately generous… What is Tom Perrotta but an American Chekov whose characters even at their most ridiculous seem blessed and enobled by a luminous human aura?"

——Will Blythe, New York Times Book Review

"With this, his fifth book, Tom Perrotta has to be considered one of our true genius satirists. Little Children is a great book. Hilarious (I haven't laughed out loud so much over a book in years) but also deeply compassionate and, at times, terrifying. It's both an indictment of, and an elegy to, that odd sociological construct known as suburban America. I was enthralled by every page, and damn if I didn't find myself wishing I'd written it."

——Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River