Hitting Below the Belt?
Because of a single word, some school librarians are nixing this year’s Newbery winner
By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 3/1/2007
Who knows if librarians would have reacted differently if Susan Patron had used the word “nuts,” “balls,” or even “cojones” in her Newbery Medal–winning novel. 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 book on the front page of the New York Times.
The main questions being asked on LM_NET, an online discussion group for school librarians, were if “scrotum” was really necessary in a story written for tweens and should media specialists buy the book for their libraries. Most librarians answered no to both items—little did they know their comments would become fodder for a juicy story.
The controversy, first reported in 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, 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 telephone calls should not affect the overall selection of a book,” he says.
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, who has the book in her library, added that she couldn’t “possibly read this as a read-aloud and am thinking it will be challenged big time.”
By February 8, Nilsson had received 25 responses 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 librarians could justify having the book in their collections if it didn’t support the curriculum. (Klein has since purchased the novel for her library.)
Patron, a children’s librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, says she’s “shocked and horrified” to read that some school librarians are not including her book in their collections because they object to the word “scrotum” or fear parental objections to the word.
Michele Nokleby, a librarian at Hawthorne Elementary in Montana, was definitely in the minority on LM_NET when she wrote that Lucky was “an important book” for her students to read. “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, wrote Nokleby.
Pat Scales, an SLJ columnist on First Amendment issues, says kids won’t get to form their own opinions about the novel if they don’t have access to it. “This book has already passed the criteria for good literature,” she says. “A selection decision shouldn’t be based on one word.”
Sales have definitely soared since the controversy started, and Lucky now ranks among the five top-selling children’s books on BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com, where it ranked at 690 two days before the Times article. Even David Letterman wants Patron on his show.
