Scrotumgate, a Children’s Literature Controversy

In case you missed it, there was a some controversy in the library/elementary education/children’s literature world earlier this year. And it all revolved around the word scrotum.

On the first page of the Newbery award winning book, The Higher Power of Lucky, you’ll find that word. According to a New York Times article, some librarians and teachers were a tad uncomfortable handling a book that mentions a dog’s scrotum on the first page and so chose to keep the book out of their libraries and schools.

And that was the beginning of scrotumgate. Once the story hit the NYT, Neil Gaiman, a well-known British children’s author, weighed in with a blog post, An Absence of Scrota — Your Guide to Quality Literature. The author of the book in question, Susan Patron, also responded in Publishers Weekly.

My Scrotum Week describes teacher Monica Edinger’s experience reading the first page with the offending word to her 4th grade class. The kid’s didn’t get it, and two of them decided to write letters to the NYT:

We were appalled to hear that some librarians had banned the book from their libraries just because of some old word.

To hear both sides from librarians, read School Library Journal‘s Scrotumgate Lives On.

Lost in most of the discussion is that The Higher Power of Lucky is a sweet, heartening story of a young girl’s quest to understand the world around her.