‘The Higher Power of Lucky,’ by Susan Patron, which is also the winner of the Newbery Medal, this year, is facing a lot of troubles and tribulations. And it is all due to the occurrence of the word scrotum in the book. The use of the word, that too in children’s literature has shocked school librarians and so, most of them are determined to get the book banned, especially for elementary schools. The book has also reinitiated the debate over what contents should be accepted particularly for children’s literature. The controversy was first published by Publishers Weekly.
‘The Higher Power of Lucky’ was first published in November by Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. After the declaration of the Newbery on Jan. 22, another 100,000 copies were published. The word appears when the book’s heroine, Lucky Trimble, a 10-year-old orphan, hears the word being spoken by another character. He says that he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum. The paragraph continues, ‘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 already facing a ban in school libraries in some states in the South, the West and the Northeast. On electronic mailing lists too, dozens of literary blogs and social-networking sites, teachers, authors and school librarians are debating over the book. The topic has indeed been a hot topic among librarians since a long time. It is not the first time school librarians are against a book’s content. There have been issues on Harry Potter books too. Some school officials say that they back witchcraft and Satanism. The teen books by Judy Blume, are generally kept out of school libraries.
Pat Scales, a former chairwoman of the Newbery Award committee said, ‘The people who are reacting to that word are not reading the book as a whole‘. She added, ‘That’s what censors do - they pick out words and don’t look at the total merit of the book‘. Ms. Patron is also stunned by the protestation. She said that the word appears because Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up and this is one of the themes for the book. So, the knowledge of language and body parts, then, is very important to her.
