Kind Heart is not so much an in-your-face anti-bullying book. It's more about how parents raise their children to be kind to all people, no matter the color of their skin, if they have a disability or if they're different from other kids. The main character has a birth defect, but he never lets this get in his way, and he constantly sticks up for the underdog or a classmate that is different from others.
I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, in the '60s where prejudice was rampant. I grew up Protestant in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood. Our family became friends with neighborhood families whom were Catholic. When I was five or six, one of our family friends told me I couldn't play with them because I wasn't Catholic. I was crushed. I thought something was wrong with me because I wasn't Catholic! This affected me greatly and is part of the reason I wrote this book. Sometimes we meet, or grow up with people we may think will be a good role model -instead they give us a model of how not to be!