Best. Image. Ever.

And the winner of the Best Image to Come Out of the 2007 Newbery Award Debacle goes to . . . . .

THE DISCO MERMAIDS!!!

Get me a t-shirt of this. Stat! And I insist that you all go over to their site and give true voice to your admiration. Now. Go. Shoo.

Best Summaries of the Week Yet

Monica Edinger has summed up the Great Scrotum Debate of '07 with a post that takes into account children's reactions. If you're not sick of this topic by now (and with a name like "scrotum" how could you be?) head on over and take a look-see.

Mediabistro did a great round-up as well, showing how many of the librarians quoted in the original New York Times piece are doing some serious backpedaling in terms of whether or not they'd purchase the book. I like that Ron Hogan knows his Newbery winners. Frisby Forever!

Oh. And extra ballsy points going out to Kane/Miller Publishers. Taking advantage of the state of the world today, they've had the wherewithal to post a review of their own book Lucky which just happens to be about..... a dog. No scrotums that I can see, but note the position of the dog's rear. If anyone wanted to inspect it, they'd be more than able.

She Made It

Ordering starts here.

Lucky Scrotum '07 - Bringing It On Home

Gelf Magazine's motto is "Looking Over the Overlooked". Qualification enough for their recent piece Youth Literature Is Full of Scrotums, it seems. It's a response to the librarian quotedin the recent New York Times article who sniffed that scrotums have no place in children's literature. Trust Gelf to prove her wrong.

Now calling some of these books "Youth Literature" comes as a bit of a stretch, but I admire their tenacity. A box of chocolates to the poor intern who must have been despatched to the local library to scout out any and all books in which that word might appear (and for the librarian who would have helped).

As for the debate that rages on, I feel that a recent Onion article on a related topic ties in beautifully.

Thanks to Kids Lit for the first link and Bookninja for the second.

Scrotastic!

This is by no means a complete encapsulation of thoughts by people on the Lucky Scrotum Debate (as it should hitherto be known), but rather just those posts that caught my eye.

You know a news item is big when the Daily Kos starts running info on it. Likewise, Ron Hogan posted info on Scrotumgate (I'm trying to settle on a catchy moniker here, but the word doesn't really lend itself to a media-grabbing title) recently on Galleycat that sums up some great salient points. What Adrienne Thinks About That has tallied a lot of the sites out there discussing it far better than I. The site librarian.net ("putting the rarin' back in librarian since 1999") had plenty to say in the last few days. And according to A Year of Reading, the smartest rant on the Lucky Scrotum comes via a site called Pragmatic Chaos. I liked the piece, but it sure made me feel old. The writer was 11 during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal? Oh, momma. I think I'll go get my walker and drink a phosphate on the porch as I reminisce about the early days of Caleco.

Hot Topic Time

Nothing like a zinging literary debate to ward off the chill February months.

You may not have noticed it, but since I posted my disappointment with those children's librarians that refuse to stock The Higher Power of Lucky on their shelves I've had at least two people speaking in defense of the move via my comment section. One, by the name of S., wrote this very interesting point:

I just read the opening couple pages of The Higher Power of Lucky to several groups: a kidlit class at a liberal arts college in middle Ameria, a group of K-4 teachers in middle America, a Creative Writing for Children class in middle America. All were hesitant about giving The Higher Power of Lucky to students.

After reading it several times, it's not just the S-Word, or the anonymous 12-step programs--it's something about the tone that is set up immediately. Those things are generally offensive in Middle America, but it's the combination of them, plus the density of the text at first, that creates the strong impression. If a kid doesn't know what a 12-step anonymous program is (AA is never mentioned) then it's hard to understand what is happening. The phrase "Hard Pan Found Object Wind-Chime Museum and Visitor's Center" is a mouthful, and the rest is sometimes--well, it has a different sort of rhythm and flow. And that results in an cumulative tone that doesn't let a reader in.

I don't think it's just that word. But in Middle America, this book will not play well, from my small sampling. Like it or not, much of America is still conservative, while publishing is largely not conservative. They/we are willing to accept the different, the unusual--but this opening strikes the ear and the reader with too much of a dischordant tone.

We're currently discussing whether or not a person can judge a title via the first three pages or not. The second one had a different take:

Please remember that school libraries and public libraries have different functions, as well as financing. When a school budget is tight (and I've heard of schools that allot $500 a year to their libraries collections, where non-fiction is the priority,) the librarian has to make hard choices. Buying a book he doesn't think his patrons will read and isn't a tied into the school's curriculum becomes necessary. When three of the last five winners (Lucky may or may not join that list,) have very little young reader appeal among the librarian's patrons, not automatically buying the winner may be a valid decision.

This makes a lot of sense when you consider books like Kira-Kira and Criss Cross with their 14-year-old girl bent. So then the focus switches to whether or not Lucky is appropriate for younger ages. Ho ho!

And then, of course, there was that pretty little New York Times article (which may have disappeared by now) covering the Lucky debate. Now THIS particular piece is remarkable primarily because of its ill turns of phrase. I just adored this quote in particular:

If it were any other novel, it probably would have gone unnoticed, unordered and unread. But in the world of children’s books, winning a Newbery is the rough equivalent of being selected as an Oprah’s Book Club title. Libraries and bookstores routinely order two or more copies of each year’s winners, with the books read aloud to children and taught in classrooms.

Oh dear. The Newbery is now the children's equivalent of Oprah's Book Club? I guess in the sense of selling a book instantaneously, but a part of me wishes that there were a nicer adult equivalent.

Loved the end of the article as well.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.

And now we have the first! How lovely. Shall we nitpick the quote and point out that it is not a man's genitalia but a dog's? I don't think it's too much to ask that all the people who discount the book read it through. Then, at the very least, we'd have a better informed debate.

One more question for you as well. If anything, this debate is interesting because it brings up the listserv LM_Net which I've not heard much of before. I belong to the Pub-Yac listserv and child_lit, but what are the advantages of LM_Net? Any subscribers out there?

Prolific Typos and Lucky's Scrotum

Horn Book editor Roger Sutton recently posted the following query on his blog regarding typos in new books: "should a review mention their presence in a book even when they are few or solitary?" I've often wondered this myself. It's rare, but once in a while I'll review a hardcover edition of a new book with multiple errors cropping up willy-nilly all over the place. Do I mention this in my review then? Is it even the author's fault?

An Australian author by the name of Lili Wilkinson had a rather nice point which I shall now quote here:

A two paragraph review of my first book spent one paragraph detailing a typo, what it was, what page it was on.

the other paragraph questioned that the word 'rape' was mentioned in the book, but not included in the glossary.

i would have preferred a negative review to a persnickety one.

So that was one debate. But read through the comments and suddenly there's a virtual flame war regarding Susan Patron's use of the word "scrotum" in The Higher Power of Lucky. Just out of curiosity, why does Roger's blog get all the attacks between commentators? I love you guys, but we should totally try to match him in peculiar rivalries over tiny topics. We could fake it, of course. MotherReader could say that the word "scrotum" is funny and J.L. Bell could counter that the word "ball-sack" is funnier (which it is) and it could descend into a mud-splattering free-for-all involving the invoking of various Norse gods and minor celebrities. How 'bout it? Y'all in?

Sidenote: You know how Washington Mutual is trying to earn some street cred by calling itself WaMu? Can I start calling Horn Book HoBo? Please? Pretty please?