An award-winning children’s book about a ten-year-old girl seeking answers about life has provoked an uproar in America because it uses the word “scrotum” on the first page.

Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky, which won America’s top children’s book award, is being barred from school libraries in parts of the country because of the mention of male genitalia — even though the actual reference is to the scrotum of a dog.

The book tells the story of a girl named Lucky, who eavesdrops on adults seeking the help of a “higher power” at programmes for drug addicts and alcoholics.

In the second paragraph, Lucky listens through a hole in the wall to a drunk called Sammy, who uses the offending word.

The Higher Power of Lucky won the Newbery Medal, considered the Pulitzer of children’s literature, last month and has gone into a second print run of 100,000.

The award virtually guarantees a children’s book a place in every school library, but the word “scrotum” provoked a furore on the internet, with bloggers and library professionals questioning whether the book was appropriate for its readership of 9 to 12-year-olds.

One of the first to raise objections was Dana Nilsson, a librarian in Durango, Colorado. “This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope,” Ms Nilsson wrote on LM-Net, an electronic mailing list reaching more than 16,000 school librarians: “How very sad.” Other writers and librarians jumped in on both sides of the fray — some saying that they would not buy the book for their schools. The debate was reminiscent of attempts by Christian conservatives to ban the Harry Potter books for alleged Satanism.

Ms Patron, herself a librarian in charge of developing the children’s collection at the Los Angeles public library, said that she was shocked by the reaction. “If I were a ten-year-old and learnt that adults were worried that the current Newbery book, I’d figure out a way to get my mitts on it anyway.”

“The child who learns the definition of scrotum in this way, through reading and talking with adults, is armed with, for one thing, an alternative to finding answers through first-hand experience,” she said.

Foul language?

— ‘Sammy told of the day when he had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked ’62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum. Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.’

— Scrotum: Latin for the pouch that holds the testes, possibly a variant of scortum, ‘a skin, hide’

Times Recommends

• Tehran cannot live up to its rhetoric
• The new unicycle that will ‘change the world’
• We cannot wish away Iran’s bomb