The Book of Mean People
Pulitzer 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 theirBig Boxsubtlety by begging the  question--of both kidsandgrownups--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 Peopleends  inevitably, triumphantly--"I will smile anyway!"--with a joyous, naked plunge  into a flowery forest. ("How about that!") (Ages 4 to 8)--Paul Hughes