Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Overview… a suburban stay-at-home dad who misses the carefree days of his youth when he was quarterback on his high school football team. Reality has set in, and now he is being pressured by his wife to take the bar and become a lawyer. He tries to escape from his house whenever he can and often takes his son to the park. Although he enjoys spending time with his son, he also likes being with the other moms there who apparently appreciate his good looks and call him The Prom King. He has taken a special shine to a local woman named Sarah. While Brad should be studying for the state bar exam, he tends to either spend his time with Sarah or practicing for his amateur football team, The Guardians.
Personality… masculine, handsome, and a bit flighty. Brad has lost track of what he wants from life. He does not want to be a lawyer, despite his training. He’s simply nostalgic for the simple days before he had a family, a mortgage, and the other responsibilities of adult life.
Get to Know him in...
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The lives of two lovelorn spouses from separate marriages, a registered sex offender, and a disgraced ex-police officer intersect as they struggle to resist their vulnerabilities and temptations.
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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 exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground.
