Product Description

For a happy few of us there is the good fortune of having had a Mr. Sweet in our childhood. Someone who erases the boundaries between children and adults, whose praise makes us strong--and whose love teaches us what love really is. The luminous full-color paintings are alive with the tender joy of the story.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #953281 in Books
• Published on: 1993-02-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 32 pages

From Publishers Weekly
An adult sensibility infuses this evocative work, which is somewhat long for the picture book format, and more of a memoir than a linear narrative. Deeter's naturalistic paintings fairly burst with color. All ages.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Grade 2-5 Although this book rambles in the fashion of oral narrative, at its center is the narrator's feeling for Mr. Sweet, an elderly friend from her childhood. Dia betic and alcoholic Mr. Sweet is repeat edly recalled from the edge of ``death'' by the narrator and her brother. Their affectionate need for him works like a charm until his 90th birthday, when the narrator hurries back from the university but is only just recognized before Mr. Sweet is really gone. Mr. Sweet's mor tality is somehow a personal failure as well as a personal loss. This book does not successfully bridge the distance be tween the quality of the author's experi ence and the accessibility of that experi ence to a young audience. Its text, unusually long for a picture book, is di gressive, minimally structured, and sometimes difficult to read aloud. Refer ences to alcoholism, womanizing, ques tionable parentage, and poverty lend a confusing aura of realism to what is es sentially a romanticized tale. The first- person narrator herself seems not to have clarified her own contradictory feelings towards the events she retells. On one page she admits that ``these deaths upset me fearfully, and the thought of how much depended on me . . .made me very nervous,'' while two pages further on she says, `` it did not occur to us that we were doing anything special; we had not learned that death was final when it did come.'' Like the text, the many full-page illustrations are both hyper-realistic and highly roman tic. Poetic pastels, and repeated motifs of flowers, rainbows, and blue skies, balance details of peeling paint and patched clothes. Deeter is a sensitive portraitist and makes the heroine beauti ful through emphasizing her black fea tures. A note of sentimentality in the pictures echoes a similar note, for all the narrator's forthrightness, in the text. Patricia Dooley, formerly at Drexel Uni versity, Philadelphia
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel The Color Purple, which was preceded by The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian. Her other bestselling novels include By the Light of My Father's Smile, Possessing the Secret of Joy and The Temple of My Familiar. She is also the author of two collections of short stories, three collections of essays, five volumes of poetry and several children's books. Her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker now lives in Northern California.

Catherine Deeter is the award-winning illustrator of Alice Walker's Finding the Green Stone , To Hell With Dying , and Langston Hughes: American Poet as well as Seymour Bleu.

Customer Reviews

BEAUTIFUL BOOK!!!
Beautifully written, beautifully illustrated. My mother insisted on reading this book to me when i was at the age where i was "too old for children's books!" When she finished, i asked whether maybe i could keep the book...

Read at your own risk!
Even if the ALA gives it a horrible review, this book is the side kick to literature such as The Bluest Eye, and Color Purple, believe it or not I would not consider this book for even my 5th graders, but rather the graduate level Library Science students! I had to read it twice and stop along the way, take in the details and realize how this miserable man's life had touched a young bright girl. At a time when so much is against African Americans a book comes along and you see a different reality. A reality whites choose to dismiss altogether, I'm Latino and in many ways I cannot relate to this story, however; it was a story that proves people wrong in so many ways.

lovely story about the connection between people
I remember reading this book when I was a little girl and being so moved at 7 or 8 years old by the sensitivity of the relationship between the little girl and old man and the accute sense of personal loss at his death. Now that I am older, I appreciate even more the emphasis of human connection that shines through in this book. How wonderful to be a child and have a friend like Mr. Sweet. Although written in a style that younger children can easily relate to, it is a beautiful story to be appreciated at any age. I still have my copy twenty years later. The only hesitation would be the title which may make some parents nervous but again, I was never negatively influenced by it and the story's positive message far outweighs this one flaw. Beautiful illustrations as well.