PERFECT LITTLE WORLD by Kevin Wilson

Izzy is a pregnant teenager, and the father of her unborn child is the high school art teacher, Hal.  Izzy wants to have the baby, with or without Hal’s support, and she comes to the attention of a scientific study involving communal child raising.  Dr. Preston Grind, who is in charge of the project, claims that the living conditions for the 10-year duration of the study do not represent a commune, but he’s basically splitting hairs on that question.  Still, Izzy signs up, as she figures raising her son in a closed environment with nine couples and their newborns is preferable to having to work two jobs just to make ends meet. The kids, of course, don’t realize that they are guinea pigs, but the parents create an unpredictable family dynamic.  Izzy is the only single parent, and, in many ways, she is an observer, but she also has more common sense than the rest of the collective family, despite a few lapses in judgment—understandable for someone so young.  Whether or not the project is successful as a child-raising alternative is almost beside the point, since the parents are the real wild cards here.  Unfortunately, I felt that the author painted them with overly broad strokes, so that we never really get a clear delineation of who’s who.  His focus is Dr. Grind, whose own childhood was a nightmare, and on Izzy, and, granted, she is the character we care about the most—strong, intelligent, compassionate.  Oddly, the author has chosen not to make her ambitious, and I was frustrated that she was not motivated to make better use of her smarts.  I finally realized that one of Izzy’s many gifts is that she is not restless or impatient, nor is she particularly concerned with what comes after the 10-year project is complete.  She is mostly content to let things run their course and then take it from there.  On the other hand, she is diligent in her pursuits and goes after what she wants.  As for the group parenting project, I am curious as to what inspired the author to come up with this idea.  He has certainly given us something to contemplate with regard to what constitutes a family and that families can devolve into mayhem, even without the influence of outside forces.