Reviews

Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson

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ambergamgee's review against another edition

5.0

Oh, I loved this book so much! It was interesting and thought provoking and quirky. I could not stop thinking about it all week as I was reading it.
It really addresses the issue of parenting in a unique way. Very clearly, children swinging in the opposite way from the way their parents raised them when it comes time to be parents themselves. Many issues of raising young children hit close to home, I’m not sure this book would have struck me the same way if I wasn’t a parent myself.
My bachelors is in early childhood and family studies, and so I found all of that interesting. Just a nit picking note: The marshmallow test that comes up in the book has been criticized widely. The test says that students who have the self control to not eat a marshmallow will have greater success as an adult; however, the original test did not account for socio-economic factors, and the success more correlated to higher income kids (who have access to so many more resources that lead to their successes in adulthood). I was able to look past that (mostly, lol) and enjoy the role that the marshmallow test plays in this story.

Major spoiler about the end:

It was not surprising, but of course frustrating, that the wealthy people stole the Infinite Family methodologies to greater improve their own outcomes and resources. This is one hundred percent exactly how childhood, family, and education research works in the real world. Experiments are tried out on poor people, often explicitly trying to help under privileged communities (though not always). If they’re found to not work, oh well, it’s just poor folk anyways (/sarcasm) and if it does work, it is given to the privileged and upper class. It’s upsetting to watch, working and learning in this field. So it was unsurprising but still upsetting to see it happen in this book too.

Loved this book! I also loved Keven Wilson’s Nothing the See Here, so I guess I need to read all his work!

missj's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

acrickettofillthesilence's review

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2.0

This review comes in four parts.

Part One: Pacing

This is the shortest part. The pacing was bad. We're talking: take-half-the-book-to-set-up-the-premise bad. I'm assuming the author wanted to get us good and acquainted with the main character, Izzy, though, and that would be acceptable if it weren't for...

Part Two: Characterization

Who is Isabel Poole? No really; I still want to know. All the book gives me to work with is that she has no motivation to do anything. She's just "strong," as the narrator tells us over and over without proving. She's casually brilliant, having the highest IQ of all the parents in the project (supposedly), and for some reason attracted to men much older than her who she ends up taking care of. She took all the APs her high school had to offer but for some reason didn't want to college—even before she got pregnant. She just...didn't feel motivated?

At the same time, she picked up tons of different hobbies and managed to perfect them. Again, for no reason. So. Passive.

Because the pacing's so lopsided (hello, 200 pages for the actual, eight-year project itself), we never really get to know any of the other characters. They're all just paper dolls moving around this beautiful campus in the woods. Speaking of non-characters...

Part Three: The Ending

Spoiler

What ends up shutting the project down? The evil entity otherwise known as Brenda Acklen's granddaughter. For pretty much no reason other than...pettiness? Maybe? You know what? I'm just going to give this as a block quote because I love it so much.

It's about protecting her dream for childhood development from the obviously poor candidates that you chose to make up this project. You chose deficient people, Dr. Grind. You picked people who were accustomed to nothing and you overwhelmed them with so many possibilities that they sabotaged the project. We are not going to make that mistake again. Ever. We're going to help people who have the means to help themselves.

Those poor people can't hold their newfound wealth, ammiright?

No really. That's the only motivation we're given for this woman shutting down the project a year before it was supposed to end. It's the least-subtle way I've ever heard a writer print people born to wealth as inherently evil.

TBH, I don't really know why the stakes are so high to everyone that this thing is ending a whopping year early, but Dr. Grind doesn't even put up a fight about the project ending early. He doesn't even try to put in a counter-argument. He's just kind-of accepting of it.

Which I guess is meant to be a character trait of his, but that doesn't make for a very interesting conflict.

It doesn't help that the summary gives away the ending. Without that big reveal, there's really no conflict. Or plot. Believe it or not, that brings us to the final point...

Part Four: Patting Self on the Back-ery

The author really lays it on thick about how great everyone thinks the project is. Even with the mild drama, there aren't ever any stakes or any conflict. It's just 350 pages about just how great it is that you can artificially build a family if you have infinite resources. Even when conflicts arose (

Spoiler

looking at you, Mary's random hatred of Izzy

), nothing ever came of them(

Spoiler

except for the event that triggered the wealth ex machina

). And we never really knew the characters to feel any stakes because, again, all the other characters felt like paper dolls too nervous to say anything bad because of how great an opportunity the project is. Supposedly.

PS: If you're in my book club and reading this, I'm sorry.

PPS: Can someone else handle how unscientific and unprofessional this study was?