Susan Patron’s book, The Higher Power of Lucky, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, is censorship’s latest victim. As The New York Times reports here,”The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.” According to the Times article, “[t]he book has already been banned from school libraries in a handful of states in the South, the West and the Northeast, and librarians in other schools have indicated in the online debate that they may well follow suit.”
I’m no expert on book banning, but it seems to me that censoring the book will only increase its popularity. At least that’s what happened with Judy Blume’s Blubber and Deenie in my grade-school.
-Bridget Crawford
“Scrotum” isn’t as amusing a body part name as “sphincter” but it’s still pretty funny. Sad to see so many librarians capitulating on this.