Lynne Cherry

So this book is pretty, but you can barely go a page without it preaching about how humans are destroying the natural world. I mean, clearly, that's bad. That's why we have things like national parks. But the way that it gets its message across is so didactic that it's skin-crawling.

She's a great artist. I would say she's not that good of a writer. It's the equivalent of drawing diagrams of everything. You don't need to spell it out. When you do that, it becomes uninteresting to read. The person who's reading it feels like you're talking down to them. They feel like you're saying you're better than they are. Nobody wants to read a book like that.