Little Children

by Tom Perrotta

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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... see complete book description

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lulu_bella says

Todd was the name of the director, but that seems like a silly reason to change the name of a character.

posted Monday, July 23 2007

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lulu_bella says

I agree. I was completely surprised when the book ended. I didn't realize that they changed Todd's name either, it's been a while since I saw the movie. That is weird. Who knows why they did these things. Maybe wikipedia knows.

posted Monday, July 23 2007

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artemis_98 says

I thought the movie was brilliant. It affected me way much more than the book. The movie is an excellent pages-to-pictures adaptation, in my view. I didn't even realize the endings were different! Or that Todd's name had been changed to Brad. (Shows how forgetful I am, I guess.)

posted Monday, July 23 2007

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skoolmom says

And Why in the World did they change Todd's name to Brad in the movie??
Todd means Foxy or Fox like- seems a better choice.

posted Monday, July 23 2007

mamacate says

The difference in endings completely bamboozled me. It almost seemed like they wanted to wrap things up in a neat little package for the movie, but WHY--especially since the rest of the movie was slavishly adherent to the book (as another commenter said, eerily so). It's not like the movie abandoned the book's nihilism; what good did the (marginally) neater ending do? Strange. I still enjoyed revisiting this world through the movie (seen about a year and a half after reading the book), though I certainly left it puzzled.

posted Sunday, July 22 2007