Lucky Trimble is about to lose her guardian to France, become an orphan, and so lose her dog, HMS Beagle. Looking for a back door out of this inevitability, Lucky eavesdrops on 12-step programs to see how those down-and-out-ers found a higher power and a way out. Like Lynda Barry's Cruddy for the 10-year-old set, The Higher Power of Lucky is delightful, audacious, funny and mentions the word "scrotum." Not a human scrotum. A dog's. But because of that, a librarian from Colorado complained, the complaint got picked up online, other librarians joined the anti-scrotum fray and high controversy ensued.
This is the stupidest non-issue ever. If we don't want our children to know that dog scrotums exist, we'll have to bring home only bitches. Even then, somewhere, somehow, a child will spy the dreaded canine sac a-dangling. Don't these librarians know that when children are not given a name for something, what they come up with instead is always dirtier, more specific and usually really weird?
Critics have long suggested that books portraying gritty, non-Ozzie-and-Harriet families are the result of today's therapy-and-meetings-and-talk-show society. Several years ago, one New York Times reviewer called the dawning trend "worrisome."
But grit's been around for thousands of years! Up until fifty years ago, it was normal for children to witness and assist with animal mating, birthing and dying — the 3 things we now try to tuck away not only from children, but from the rest of us grown-ups, too. This has made us a flimsier species. When adults are not given names for things, such as what goes on in their elderly mother's body or in the "rest" home where she's been deposited, what we imagine is both vague and terrifying. Separated from death, we've forgotten that it's just a part of life, as scrotums are just a part of the body, as mental illness is a part of most families somewhere along the line. For the 10 million American children who have a parent in jail, prison is as familiar an institution as a library.
I was one of those 10 million. My dad went to prison when I was 6, and for the 4 years he was there, I was not allowed to visit him, I was not encouraged to speak about it, and there was no Visiting Day by Jacqueline Woodson for me to read to let me know I wasn't the only one who felt or lived like this.
I thought my best friend had the perfect family, and I moved out of my mother's house into hers. Twenty years later, it turns out my friend's father was drunk that whole time and I just didn't notice, I guess because the mother covered for him so well — leaving her no time for my young friend, who ended up, like many children of alcoholics, frozen with perfectionism and full of anxiety and constant dire predictions. Would it have really hurt for her to have stumbled across My Ol' Man by Patricia Polacco, or one of the other books about children of alcoholics and enablers?
The Times guy apparently doesn't want his daughter reading books like this because he's not an alcoholic and he thinks it would scare or scar her. But my dad wasn't an alcoholic, and I don't think reading that would have hurt me. But I might have gained a little empathy for my friend. "Why the but?" O'Reilly interrupts. "Why are you giving the kids the but?"
"Truth is ninety percent but, you nasty beast!" I yelled at my TV. But Mr. O'Reilly didn't hear me. He'd moved on to taking "an inside look at what some are calling Al Qaeda High, a school in Virginia that some say promotes radical Islam."
My favorite of the "but" books is Broken Umbrellas by Kate Spohn. It's about an old woman who sleeps on roofs and collects umbrellas. It gives the backstory, how she immigrated to the United States as a little girl and learned to make a game out of poverty. Stylish and kind, she did well at school and teaching at a university. It describes, better than any for-adults book I've ever read, her subsequent descent into schizophrenia and homelessness. It mentions the hard, odd parts of her daily existence, but it also captures the beauty and kindness and optimism she finds as she "walked along feeling lucky."
Not mentioning in children's books so-called controversial subjects (they're not, really; they're just life) in order to protect children is the same as how, in the 50s, blacks or Jews or single parents weren't part of stories. Not because they didn't exist back then, but because everyone somehow tacitly agreed to pretend they didn't. There is no Other. There's just us, and we're a motley crew.