One Potato Review

A book like this doesn’t get made without the influence of a Pulitzer Prize winner (it’s co-authored, at least nominally, by Toni Morrison and her son), still it’s kind of thrilling to witness it running around in the wild, a little menacing, a little out of control. Though it would probably remain a little unintelligible also, if the great Giselle Potter were not around to color in the metaphors, because this is finally a fable about all of the ways we trap, or abandon, or surrender our children to stereotypes which owe as much to our lack of imagination as to the wealth of sturdy-sounding diagnoses that are these days everywhere available. And remedies, and panaceas: from television to Chee-tos to Spice Girl T-shirts, according to the Morrisons. Their outrage may not wear well with every reader, though for some it is surely refreshing. This book doesn’t end up offering a lot of solutions exactly for the disruptive little Patty, or the hyperactive Mickey, but it does – to its credit – imagine a future when they have inevitably climbed out of the box.