Oh, and I think I saw that well-endowed squirrel last week…chasing one of our dogs! Aw, nuts, maybe it was another squirrel.

At age 11, I told my mother that…

1. I was not going through the period stuff….I was going to just skip it and immediately start “car dating.” 
2. I knew how ladies got pregnant. Billy Smith’s mother told me she drank out of her husband’s tea cup.

So, there. Who needed that funny book with the pictures…I had it all figured out.

My mother took up smoking that year…followed shortly with drinking. I, on the other hand, took 6 years of biology, microbiology, and anatomy. I still haven’t figured out sex…but the occasional drink puts everything into perspective.

How does that squirrel run?

I believe the cause of his condition may well reside in the scrotum, about which you write so eloquently. Fortunately, his inclination from the perpendicular should be amenable to corrective surgery.

“Nuts, In Every Sense of the Word” at Gehayi

“What’s So Wrong with the Word Scrotum?” at The Most Cake

“Ode to a SCROTUM, Everyone…ODE!!!” at Swamp Spells and Then Some

“Oh, the Outrate! The Horror!” at Brandywine Books

“President’s Day” at PersonaNonData

“Youth Literature is Filled with Scrotums” at Gelf Magazine–Looking Over the Overlooked 

The subject matter in that book should be above a 10 year old’s head, but unfortunately it isn’t. This is the age of that cartoon character smarty Bart Simpson and King of the Hill and other such stuff that shows on Saturday mornings, which I had no idea had gotten so suggestive until I watched them with my step granddaughter.

I’m on the outraged librarian’s side. If my 10 year old brought that book home in 1987, I would have called the school up and rocked the principal on her heels (using lady-like language, of course). If my granddaughter were to have brought that book home in 2000, I would have rocked the school’s librarian and the princpal after first carefully explaining to my step daughter why it was so upsetting–because, gasp, she wouldn’t know why.

It isn’t a children’s book subject matter. The first chapter incites interest in seeing a scrotum simply because the protag is interested in seeing one–or not. Come on. Why is that even necessary in a children’s book?

I was introduced to the word when I was 8 because I asked where babies came from just to make sure that my friend wasn’t telling me a fib. She wasn’t.

[Insert deep and gusty sigh here]

I am deeply disappointed that children grow up so fast these days. There’s no protection for them anymore. They are exposed to things that make me shudder as an adult. It is so sad that a children’s book author has to write a story about 12-step programs inspiring a child to look for the Higher Power. There’s a word for that, but it may be too strong a word for “worldly sensitive” ears. I’ll say it anyway. Rubbish.

What is wrong with a children’s librarian wanting good books with good subject matter? In this world of ours, have we become so jaded that we think children can’t be interested in stories like Beatrice Potter wrote? Or Joan Aiken? Or even Phyllis Whitney? Or must we all succomb to the spell of J.K. Howling?

Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing ™: Gina is a grant writer in Newellton, Louisiana. She’s in the process of writing Running from Shadows.