Single word fuels fight over children's book

The word "scrotum" does not often come up in polite conversation. Or children's literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of "The Higher Power of Lucky," by Susan Patron, this year's winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children's literature. The book's heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog on the scrotum.

"Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much," the book continues. "It sounded medical and secret, but also important."

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary-school students, and has reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children's books.

On electronic mailing lists such as Librarian.net, dozens of literary blogs and pages on the social-networking site LiveJournal, teachers, authors and school librarians took sides over the book. Librarians all over America weighed in, questioning the role of the librarian when selecting — or censoring, some argued — literature for children.

"This book included what I call a Howard Stern type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn't have the children in mind," Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians.

The book has been banned from school libraries in a few states, and librarians in other schools have indicated they may follow suit.

If it were any other novel, it probably would have gone unnoticed, unordered and unread. But in the world of children's books, winning a Newbery is the rough equivalent of being selected as an Oprah's Book Club title. Libraries and bookstores routinely order each year's winners, with the books read aloud to children and taught in classrooms.

Patron said she was stunned by the objections. The story of the rattlesnake bite, she said, was based on a true incident involving a friend's dog. One of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is important to her.