ScrotumgateLives On
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Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 02/21/2007
Who knows if librarians would have reacted differently if Susan Patron used the word "nuts," "balls," or even "cojones" in her Newbery Medal–winning book. But the word "scrotum" on the opening page of The Higher Power of Lucky (S & S, 2006) certainly created a buzz on many discussion boards and blogs—and even landed the novel on the front page of the New York Times.
The main questions being asked on LM_NET, an online discussion group for school librarians, was if "scrotum" was really necessary in a book written for tweens and whether media specialists should buy it for their libraries. Most school librarians answered no to both, but little did they know that their comments were being scrutinized as fodder for a very juicy story.
A place in the library?
The controversy, first reported last week in our sister publication, Publishers Weekly (PW), later appeared in the February 18 Times, which said some librarians "pledged to ban the book from elementary schools." The book, awarded the Newbery Medal on January 22, is about a motherless 10-year-old named Lucky Trimble, who searches for a higher power to gain control of her life. The scrotum belongs to a dog, who is bitten there by a rattlesnake.
Rocco Staino, director of the Keefe Library in the North Salem School District in New York and a frequent contributor to SLJ, was so annoyed with his peers after reading the Times article that he wrote a letter to the paper. "Single words or the possibility of angry telephones calls should not affect the overall selection of a book," he says, adding that all school libraries have a selection policy, which guides the purchases of materials.
The whole brouhaha intensified when Dana Nilsson, a librarian at Sunnyside Elementary in Durango, CO, asked her colleagues on LM_NET how they felt about the word. "I just read the new Newbery book The Higher Power of Lucky and am wondering how anyone feels about the scrotum discussions," she wrote on February 5. Nilsson added that she couldn't "possibly read this as a read aloud and am thinking it will be challenged big time." The book is in Nilsson's library.
By February 8, Nilsson had received 25 responses from librarians in places such as Illinois, Montana, and Oklahoma—and all but one elementary school librarian said they would not buy the book. Media specialists like Betty Klein of Avery Coonley School in Illinois were also concerned about complaints from parents and whether they could justify having the book in their collection if it didn't support the school curriculum.
Patron shocked by response
Patron, a senior librarian in charge of children's collection development at the Los Angeles Public Library, says she's "shocked and horrified" to read that some school librarians are choosing not to include her book in their collections because they object to the word "scrotum" or fear parental objections to the word.
"If I were a parent of a middle-grade child, I would want to make decisions about my child's reading myself—I'd be appalled that my school librarian had decided to take on the role of censor and deny my child access to a major award-winning book," Patron wrote in a letter to PW. "And if I were a 10-year-old and learned that adults were worried that the current Newbery book was not appropriate for me, I'd figure out a way to get my mitts on it anyway."
Let the kids decide
Michele Nokleby, a librarian at Hawthorne Elementary in Montana, was definitely in the minority on LM_NET when she wrote that she enjoyed the sweet, funny, and hopeful book. "It's an important book for my student population, as many of them will identify strongly with the characters and the situations they find themselves in," she wrote.
"There are so many things that are touched on in this little book that deserve attention," including issues of addiction, abandonment, absentee and incarcerated parents, and the quest for personal strength, Nokleby wrote.
Pat Scales, an SLJ columnist on First Amendment issues and a former member of the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee, says kids won't get to form their own opinion about the book if they don't have access to it.
"School libraries should be about inclusion and not exclusion of good literature," she says. "This book has already passed the criteria for good literature. A selection decision shouldn't be based on one word—a word students probably already know.
"If they don't know the word, they should. It is an anatomically correct word, and I much prefer that word over the slang usage."
