VANCOUVER, Canada - A book banned for sale aboard western Canadian ferries because a naked boy adorns the cover has drawn worldwide attention with critics crying censorship.

"Alexander the Great novel gets bum rap in Canada," chortled a headline in a report Tuesday in the British Guardian about a ban by British Columbia Ferries of "The Golden Mean" by Canadian author Annabel Lyon.

"Censorship ... is generally bad news," wrote Eileen Reynolds in a recent post on the New Yorker's web site. But, she added, the ban on Lyon's book "is particularly silly."

The ferry service, owned by the government of Canada's westernmost province and connecting Canada's Pacific islands to the mainland, banned the book because the service is "a family show and we've got children in our gift shops," spokeswoman Deborah Marshall told the Vancouver Province newspaper. The cover features the nude back of a boy astride a white horse.

Lyon's fictional account of Aristotle as tutor to Alexander the Great won Canada's prestigious 2009 Rogers Writers' Trust first prize, and was a finalist in Canada's two other largest literary awards, the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award.

Craig Spence, president of the Federation of British Columbia Writers, called the ban "an overreaction to a photo that's artistic ... are you going to stop kids from seeing Michelangelo's David?

"The kinds of graphic material that kids are exposed to, through advertising and other media all the time, go much farther than that, and they're not in a context that would give it the justification."