Perfect Little World: A Novel

by Kevin Wilson

Kindle Edition

Published January 24, 2017

About the author

Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and five novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection, Now is Not the Time to Panic, (Ecco, 2022), and Run for the Hills (Ecco, 2025).
His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English & Creative Writing Department at the University of the South.

Reviews

[Avery]

the early examinations of izzy and grind are the best part by miles; once they got to the study it just started to fall apart for me. if it's meant to be a study about the genuine possibilities of communal parenting, it's a complete failure; the children are socially isolated to a degree that will undoubtedly affect their development, they're given access to resources from the hand of a rich god which are probably out of reach for every person who would actually benefit from a less-nuclear family (shouldn't the point be that the parents themselves are the resources for the other parents? not highly paid educational specialists and personal chefs? at this point you could just collect data from the boarding schools of the ultra-wealthy), and the obfuscation of each child's birth parent is just never ever going to be voluntarily replicated by people in real life (though i'll admit this one kinda works thematically - it's as if grind, even though he's trying to make a utopia, can't help but build in an element to sow distrust in the children). from the beginning it's designed like a pilot program for an intensely involved gated community for rich people, but we're supposed to be surprised when it ultimately IS that, because it was dr. grind's untainted scientific vision. i guess the point is a parallel between grind and his parents - they study him instead of raising him, and he goes on to make a happy little family instead of the experiment he was supposed to design. so it works, it was just driving me up the wall. also driving me up the wall: no discussion of what these deeply traumatized people are working on in the therapy they supposedly go to every week, and even though it's the subject of the very first scene in the novel and also absolutely the most interesting idea in the whole thing, there is somehow NO examination of the years when the children are old enough to start understanding genetic parentage but they're not allowed to tell them who's related, or the effect on the children's psyches of not knowing, or the emotional fallout of learning. NOBODY got upset during that process? instead it was more interesting to talk about the adults playing spin the bottle?
i guess this is a book about how you cannot guarantee emotional stability even if you try to manufacture it in a lab, and about how love is beautiful anyway. also about the looming spectre of capitalism; everything bends around it, even the thing designed as an escape from nuclear family & bootstrap-pulling. for this reason i found it almost eerie that we cycle through all these alternate definitions of what family and support looks like only to land on izzy getting married and starting a restaurant. and it COULD work as a like "oh no it's inescapable" (esp with the absent father > older male partners things) but i don't think wilson was doing that on purpose. i think i was supposed to be happy about that. so ??
does a lot of what it wanted to do, but simply has nothing interesting to say. sad.

[Tammy Howard]

I liked this book but was a little disappointed. I missed the sarcastic humor the author usually injects into his stories. The characters are interesting but the cynicism that I could so relate to in his previous books was missing in this one.
However, that being said the story covers a number of issues that I could relate to…how we do our best for our kids but never really know if we get it right-the imperfections of family dynamics-how many times family fails us, but we love them anyway, growth and healing-and many more.
It’s a solid read but not one of my favorites by this author.

[Alli Rimshaw]

Wilson has quite the storytelling voice. While portraying a flawed experiment, he weaves indescribable emotions and hope and doubt with ease, and I’m pleased with a realistic and relatively happy ending where the stakes were so high.

[Marcie Cheung]

Such a fascinating concept of how an "ideal" situation can spiral out of control. I loved it!

[Tamara]

Excellent. One of my favorite authors.

[Jude Taylor]

So elaborately written. The details of each family member and Izzy’s experiences of them are so beautifully written. I really enjoyed this author’s writing style and I’m eager to read more by them.

[Andrea]

3.8⭐️

I would’ve given it 4⭐️ but I really didn’t like that Preston & Izzy ended up together. Big time violation of boundaries. That was sort of the entire book but I just didn’t like that part.

[Kiki Sikora]

Kevin Wilson never misses. He is really the only author I read who can sell me on a peculiar plot.

[Emma Elkins]

Interesting and fun! Almost wish it was a bit longer to expand on the end.