Product Description"This is a book about mean people. Some mean people are big. Some little people are mean." In Toni Morrison's second illustrated book collaboration with her son, Slade, she offers a humorous look at how children experience meanness and anger in our world. The world and its language can be confusing to young people. To them, meanness can have many shapes, sizes, and sounds. " My mother is mean when she says I don't listen. She says, "Do you hear me?" I can't hear her when she is screaming. This wise child knows that meanness can be a whisper or a shout, a smile or a frown. Young readers know about meanness, too, and will feel satisfied by having their perspective championed in The Book of Mean People.Amazon.com ReviewPulitzer Prize-winner Toni Morrison returns with her son Slade for a second kids' book, this one a catalog of the "mean people" in a young rabbit's life. The results, happily, make for much more fun than the Morrison duo's weirdly subtleThe Big Box. "This is a book about mean people," begins our tiny hero, and almost immediately we realize that illustrator Pascal Lemaître is going to give cartoonist Matt Groening a run for his money when it comes to goofily rendered rabbits. Each "mean" person gets playful, exaggerated, kid-perspective treatment from Lemaître, whether we're seeing a towering dad who barely fits onto two pages ("Some mean people are big") or a mother who's using her nearly telescopic arm to force veggies down our hero's throat ("There are people who smile when they are being mean"). The rabbit's "Mean People" book gets assembled page by page, and no one is spared--not grandparents, brothers, teachers, not even a babysitter with an alarm clock five times the size of her head. The Morrisons maintain some of their Big Box subtlety by begging the question--of both kids and grownups--of why and whether and which of these people are really "mean" at all. (Even young kids will see the difference between making somebody get out of bed in the morning and tearing the wings off a butterfly.) Whatever the lesson, The Book of Mean People ends inevitably, triumphantly--"I will smile anyway!"--with a joyous, naked plunge into a flowery forest. ("How about that!") (Ages 4 to 8) --Paul HughesFrom BooklistPreS. The Morrisons' first picture book,The Big Box (2000), was heavy and messagy about the scariness of adults. This time the authors do a better job of showing a small child's viewpoint, and Lemaitre's cartoon-style bunny characters in ink and cheerful watercolors make the grown-ups look silly as well as ugly and mean. In the first dramatic picture, the stiff, frowning father rabbit looms across a double-page spread, his necktie like a weapon swinging at the child in the lower left-hand corner.Shouting is printed in huge letters across two pages that show the child trying to close his ears to his parents' scary standoff. Then there are grown-ups who smile when they are mean, bullies who whisper, and a teacher, a big brother, and a babysitter who are huge and overbearing. Of course, children's books long ago moved away from idyllic views of childhood innocence and bliss, so this idea isn't new. But small kids will recognize the angry scenarios, and they will enjoy talking about the pictures with adults who listen.Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved