Perfect Little World

October 10, 2016
The author of The Family Fang invents another unusual family structure for his sweet and thoroughly satisfying second novel. When bright high school senior Izzy Poole, whose mother has died and whose alcoholic father ignores her, discovers that she is pregnant by the art teacher at her Tennessee school, her choices are limited, especially after the teacher commits suicide. So when she is approached by idealistic child psychologist Dr. Preston Grind to join an experiment in communal child raising funded by the billionaire heiress to a retail store fortune, she somewhat reluctantly takes up the offer. The idea is that Izzy and nine other couples, all pregnant at the same time, will raise their kids in common in the Infinite Family Project for 10 years,
to see if that situation aids the children’s emotional and intellectual development. The children thrive; the adults, not so much. Wilson keeps his eye on the grown-ups, particularly Izzy and Preston, as rifts begin to form in the carefully planned and maintained structure. Wilson grounds his premise in credible human motivations and behavior, resulting in a memorable cast of characters. He uses his intriguing premise to explore the meaning of family and the limits of rational decision making. Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group.

Starred review from November 15, 2016
That infamous village that's needed to raise a child comes to fruition when a brilliant researcher creates a communal parenting experiment.This is another bittersweet story about messed-up families from the talented Wilson (The Family Fang, 2011, etc.) but one in which the author stays a bit more grounded, keeping an atmosphere of emotional authenticity that rings true. Wilson's muse is Izzy Poole, a just-graduated high schooler with a particular talent for barbecuing meat, who finds herself in dire straits. She's pregnant with her emotionally disturbed art teacher's baby and estranged from her father. After the art teacher commits suicide, Izzy is confronted with a very odd proposal from a researcher with an agenda. At the behest of a retail mogul, Dr. Preston Grind is determined to create a model in which 10 children are raised by a commune of parents, with no child knowing who their biological parents are. We quickly learn that the doctor is actually a hot mess, raised by two famous child psychologists who subjected their child to constant and unexpected stress throughout his upbringing. Grind may have inherited their brilliance but he's also a cutter with borderline PTSD. Torn between the experiment and raising her son, Cap, alone, Izzy decides to go along with Grind's complex scheme. "She would make it work," Wilson writes. "Izzy would find tiny ways to make herself essential, to succeed when it seemed so unlikely. Ten years, that's what she had. She would mine every essential element out of these ten years and she would be transformed." The second half of the novel checks in on this "Infinite Family Project" every year or two, as Wilson delves into the drama and tensions inherent in this strange aquarium. Relationships begin to splinter, even as Izzy becomes fundamentally reliant on the group. "We're a family," Grind says, near the end. "An imperfect one." A moving and sincere reflection on what it truly means to become a family.

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May 1, 2017

Eighteen-year-old Izzy Poole's mother died when she was young, and her father drowned his grief in alcohol. Just before her high school graduation, she learns she is pregnant by her emotionally unstable art teacher. Confronted with the prospect of raising her baby alone, Izzy joins a research study that promises support for her and her son. Dr. Preston Grind, a famous child psychologist, has created the Infinite Family Project. For 10 years, 10 babies and their parents will live in a complex. The adults will raise the children together as a collective family while pursuing their professional goals, with all living expenses covered by an eccentric benefactor; however, none of the children will know who their biological parents are. While many of the participants find the setup strange, the project is successful for a long time. But when the utopian arrangement begins to fall apart, Izzy is faced with the fear of once again being without a family. Teens will identify with Izzy's complicated relationship with her father and her hopes and fears for the future. What makes this story stand out is the questions it raises about current family structures as well as the benefits and drawbacks of the "it takes a village" approach to raising children. VERDICT Recommend this engaging, thought-provoking novel to teens interested in psychology or family studies.-Lynn Rashid, Marriotts Ridge High School, Marriottsville, MD

Copyright 2017 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2016
Preston Grind followed in his parents' professional footsteps, despite their having made him the test case for their theories about child rearing, from which he didn't emerge unscathedliterally, as we learn in Wilson's (The Family Fang, 2011) second stellar novel. When Preston's long-nurtured scheme for verifying his ideasby creating a superfamily of several age-mate children and their parentsis funded by a billionaire philanthropist, he rouses from the emotional torpor that the accidental deaths of his wife and son induced and sets to work designing the campus for such a family and selecting the adults expecting babies for the projected 10-year experiment. Isobelle Izzy Poole is the odd one of those selected, a just-out-of-high-school single mother whose baby's father, her art teacher, is already dead, a suicide. As the Infinite Family Project (the increasingly portentous name chosen by its funder) per se revolves around Grind, so the storytelling revolves around Izzy. That story, a bit Skinner's Walden Two (1948), a bit Milton's Paradise Lost, is far more compelling and far less sensational than any satire about education since (and including) Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution (1954) as well as much realer and wiser and sadder and eventually reassuring about human nature than dozens of other novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2016

Dr. Preston Grind, a wunderkind child psychologist, himself the product of a highly questionable "friction method" of parenting developed by his own psychologist parents, sets up an experimental family community in the woods of Tennessee with the financial assistance of a kindhearted billionaire widow. Housing nine young couples and one single mother (19-year-old Izzy), this collective parenting study assigns all of the adults equal responsibility for each of the kids, who don't live with their own parents (or even know their actual identity) until the age of five. It seems unbelievable that Dr. Grind and the team of psychologists he hires to organize, run, and study the community couldn't have foreseen the obvious complications of this setup, sexual indiscretions and marital infidelities chief among them. Wilson (The Family Fang) presents this world through the eyes of Izzy and Dr. Grind, both smart and sensitive individuals damaged by painful upbringings who learn to overcome them and connect. VERDICT It takes a village, or in this case a well-meaning, utopian parenting study, to create the ingredients for this almost farcical yet moving novel about love, parenting, and the families we create for ourselves. [See Prepub Alert, 8/1/16.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2016

Pregnant at her high school graduation, Isabelle Poole accepts child psychologist Dr. Grind's invitation to join a study aimed at determining what would happen if ten children were raised collectively without knowing which parents were theirs. It's not perfect. Following The Family Fang, a New York Times best seller best-booked by multiple publications.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.