26 March 2018
Elizabeth Rusch's picture book about Mario Molina, the Mexico-born chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work studying the destruction of the Earth's ozone layer, was a decade in the making. It took her nearly 30 drafts to get it right, and she was thrilled when the children's publisher Charlesbridge acquired it in 2013. The book was finally due out next month.
Then, news broke that the book's illustrator, David Diaz, had been accused of sexual harassment. Worried the book would be clouded by the controversy, Charlesbridge decided to postpone publication of "Mario and the Hole in the Sky," pulp the finished copies and hire a new illustrator.
