Will Someone Get the Sack?

Libraries Online reports the kerfuffle generated by Newbery Award–winning children's book The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron, which features the word "scrotum" on its first page.

In the novel’s page-one anecdote, 10-year-old title character Lucky overhears a meeting of a 12-step addiction-recovery program at which a man recounts how his dog got bitten by a rattlesnake. (Publishers Weekly) told how LM_NET subscriber and teacher/librarian Dana Nilsson of Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colorado, had reported to fellow list members that 24 out of 25 respondents to her query agreed with her that the use of the word was age-inappropriate and that their schools would not buy the book.

The article's title, Scrotum Flap Raises Ruckus over Librarians’ Sensibilities, is only bettered by the statement put out by Kathleen T. Horning and Cyndi Phillip, the respective presidents the American Association for School Librarians and the Association for Library Service to Children. Their joint statement of February 22 affirmed the librarian profession's commitment to “inclusion rather than exclusion” and praised Patron's book as “a gently humorous character study, as well as a blueprint for a self-examined life.”

Nice word choice.