Hillel Italie finds a new wrinkle to the “scrotum” controversy* surrounding Susan Patron‘s The Higher Power of Lucky, which has become Amazon.com‘s #2 top seller among currently published children’s books (it’s outpaced by Bridge to Terabithia, which is itself surpassed by two editions of the forthcoming final Harry Potter tome). As Italie reports, nobody seems to want to be the librarian who goes on record saying they banned the book; even one of the most vocal critics quoted in last Sunday’s NYT piece now wants to clarify that she bought the book for her library, though she’s not convinced it deserves the Newbery Medal it received. She also proposes that “while some of those who contacted her had decided not to select the book, it was for other reasons, such as unhappiness with the quality of the writing or the believability of the characters.” In fact, Italie notes, another recent Newbery winner, Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata, faced similar resistance from librarians who felt younger readers might not be able to handle a book about a Japanese-American family’s struggles in the American South during the 1950s.
(Although, heck, I remember the sort of stuff I was reading in fifth and sixth grades, like The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear and My Brother Sam Is Dead, not to mention Newbery winners like Sounder and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and I turned out okay until Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH turned me into an anarchist. But, you know, we never did get to read Julie of the Wolves at my school; maybe it was because of the sexual assault and maybe it wasn’t—as you can imagine, it really wasn’t on my radar back then.)
The theme of age appropriateness was echoed in yesterday’s letters to the Times about the original story, as one of the elementary school librarians who decided not to carry the book insists it wasn’t an act of censorship, but a choice made to better serve her patrons. “Out of 640 students, all but 90 are under 10 years old,” she explains. “How much sense does it make to spend $20 on a book aimed at 9- to 12-year-olds that so few here will read?… I have not stocked the last three Newbery Medal winners because they are not appropriate for the patrons of my library, not because I am interested in banning books.” Let’s hope her students have still got a (possibly battered) copy of Mrs. Frisby kicking around on the shelves to instill a little rebellion in their hearts.
*I know, I know: I will surely burn for that, if the Music Man reference in our original story hasn’t condemned me already.