Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Books I've read: Perfect Little World

 



I've read a few of Kevin Wilson's books and have always found them to be both hilarious and slightly odd.  So when I found this one in a second-hand bookstore, I bought it right away.

And while I did enjoy it to a point, it certainly doesn't have the same weirdness or sense of humor that so captivated me in his later books.

It's about an experiment in family, where a professor brings together ten sets of parents with babies born around the same time to bring their families up as a collective.  The main character is a young woman called Izzy, the only single parent in the group.  Funded by an unusually hands-off billionaire, the project has all the resource it needs, a beautiful campus on which the families live and enough money to pay research assistants and servants.

Initially planned to run for ten years, the families move into their "perfect little world" and surrender their children to a nursery where they are kept.  Called the Infinite Family Project,each parent plays a role in every child's life, but the children don't really have any idea which set of parents is their own.  They are collectively loved and collectively cared for.

And at first, the perfect little world is exactly what is sets out to be.  But as time goes on, personalities, ideologies and feelings clash, making things within the Infinite Family Project more challenging.  And for Izzy, the only member of the family without a partner, things grow more complicated when she realizes she has feelings for Dr. Preston Grind, the man whose idea the compound was.  How can she continue to take part in his experiments when she's aching to take him into her bed?

The ideas behind the experiment were intriguing and I was interested to see how they played out.  The communal living and communal caring brought to mind a feral hippy commune, but without the drugs and free love.  I thought it might turn into some kind of cult, but Dr. Grind was never that kind of leader.  And the children were always so well cared for, had such structure to their lives, there was no risk of them turning feral.

In fact, far more than the children, it was the adults who turned dangerous, unable to maintain the kind of rigor expected of them by the Doctor.  Which is, I suspect, the problem with experiments of this type. You may be able to control a lot, but people are unpredictable, and being placed into an environment like this may not be the right choice for everyone.  Or, anyone.

So, while I'm not raving to the rafters about this one, I did enjoy reading it.  And if you're someone who's interested in social experiments, you might be too.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

When Isabelle Poole meets Dr. Preston Grind, she’s fresh out of high school, pregnant with her art teacher's baby, and totally on her own. Izzy knows she can be a good mother but without any money or relatives to help, she’s left searching.Dr. Grind, an awkwardly charming child psychologist, has spent his life studying family, even after tragedy struck his own. Now, with the help of an eccentric billionaire, he has the chance to create a “perfect little world”—to study what would happen when ten children are raised collectively, without knowing who their biological parents are. He calls it The Infinite Family Project and he wants Izzy and her son to join.

This attempt at a utopian ideal starts off promising, but soon the gentle equilibrium among the families unspoken resentments between the couples begin to fester; the project's funding becomes tenuous; and Izzy’s growing feelings for Dr. Grind make her question her participation in this strange experiment in the first place.Written with the same compassion and charm that won over legions of readers with The Family Fang, Kevin Wilson shows us with grace and humor that the best families are the ones we make for ourselves.

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