{"id":2883,"date":"2007-02-18T11:00:38","date_gmt":"2007-02-18T11:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/childrens-lit.html"},"modified":"2007-02-18T11:00:38","modified_gmt":"2007-02-18T11:00:38","slug":"childrens-lit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/childrens-lit.html","title":{"rendered":"Children’s Lit"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a bit of a kerfuffle regareding this year’s Newberry Award winning book – and the NYTimes reports.<\/a><\/p>\n

(The issue is a single word right on the first page of the novel.)<\/p>\n

I’m going to say that what frankly surprises me about this controversy is that there are librarians who are taking a stand against stocking it, are criticizing the author and their voices are being reported by the Times.<\/em> The usual template for this is "aggrieved puritanical outsider group" v. freedom-loving librarians. <\/p>\n

\n
\n

Ms. Patron, who is a public librarian in Los Angeles, said the book was written for children 9 to 12 years old. But some librarians countered that since the heroine of \u201cThe Higher Power of Lucky\u201d is 10, children older than that would not be interested in reading it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,\u201d said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. \u201cIf I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn\u2019t want to have to explain that.\u201d <\/p>\n

Authors of children\u2019s books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book over one offending phrase. <\/p>\n

In the case of \u201cLucky,\u201d some of them take no chances. Wendy Stoll, a librarian at Smyrna Elementary in Louisville, Ky., wrote on the LM_Net mailing list that she would not stock the book. Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. \u201cI don\u2019t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,\u201d she said in an interview. One librarian who responded to Ms. Nilsson\u2019s posting on LM_Net said only: \u201cSad to say, I didn\u2019t order it for either of my schools, based on \u2018the word.\u2019 \u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a bit of a kerfuffle regareding this year’s Newberry Award winning book – and the NYTimes reports. (The issue is a single word right on the first page of the novel.) 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}