I thought he was a nineteenth-century French playwright

It may have not have registered on your radar, but there has been a recent row over a Newbery Award-winning book and school librarians. The Newbery Award is the most distinguished award for Children's literature, so why would this year's honoree be libris non-grata in schools and school libraries?

The book's heroine is a scrappy (as child heroines tend to be), ten-year-old orphan named Lucky. On the first page of the book, she hears, through a hole in the wall, a boy telling the tale of his dog getting bitten on the scrotum by a snake. "Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important."

The book is The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron, and it is the appearance of the word "scrotum" that (ironically?) has gotten Children's Librarians nickers in a twist. Fearful of parental backlash, banning requests or challenges, and hysterical fears that teachers might/will have to explain to a bunch of youngsters what the scrotum is, librarians are actively preculding this book from their collections.

Okay, that's the first "Are you kidding me?" in this saga.

The next, is that this controversy was recently covered in the New York Times.

(Favorite quote, from Durango, Colorado, Sunnyside Elementary School librarian Dana Nilsson: "I don’t want to start an issue about censorship, but you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.")

The next link in this silly chain:

Neil Gaiman, notable author and usual fan if not champion of librarians, weighed in on this issue in his blog:

So normally my love for librarians is unconditional, but recently I find myself inserting a sort of a "but..." in there. In this case it's "But I wish some of them didn't have such a problem with dog's scrotums... or do I mean scrota?"

Then again, I'm English, a country in which "the dog's bollocks" is an expression of approbation and unconditional approval.

There's a book with a dog getting bitten on the scrotum by a rattlesnake in it. It's called The Higher Power of Lucky and is by Susan Patron. It just won the Newbery Award.

Read the whole take--it's pretty funny.

And it is via Mr. Gaiman's blog that we find the biggest "Are you kidding me?" in this whole thing: Because of this ridiculous hullabaloo, someone has taken it upon themselves to make a list of popular and award-winning children's books also featuring the word "scrotum."

The title of this article?

Youth Literature is Filled with Scrotums





I wonder... If schools start setting limits to the number of these titles their libraries may include, will this form of censorship become known as the Scrota Quota?


Update: This story made it to the front of Google News this morning, with a link to 26 other articles on this topic.