Skip to main content

Display: Beehive Books


Founded in 1980, the Beehive Book Awards are the only children's choice award for literature in the state of Utah. Here are some past winners!

By Jason Hook
New York: Sterling Children's Books, 2004.

Look inside this amazing picture book and feel the embossed pages. Can you see and touch the dragon? Can you find lots and lots of dragons? They're everywhere! That's because Mr. Jones is simply mad about the creatures. He carves them out of wood and he tells thrilling stories about them. But he's never seen a real dragon, so he and his grandson George have set sail in search of one. Come along and help, using your sharp sense of sight and sensitive fingers to navigate through the pictures. But remember: to discover a really, truly fire-breathing dragon, you have to hunt high and low and always, always believe hard enough. A story kids will joyously read over and over again.

By Melissa Sweet
Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2011.

Award-winning artist Sweet tells the story of the puppeteer Tony Sarg, capturing his genius, his dedication, his zest for play, and his long-lasting gift to America -- the inspired helium balloons that would become the trademark of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

By Kate Messner
Illustrated by Ruth Greg
New York: Scholastic Press, 2017.

Told in rhyming text, a boy accompanies his grandfather on the Rolling Thunder Ride for Freedom, a demonstration in Washington, D.C., on Memorial Day that pays tribute to American veterans.

The Princess and the Pig
By Jonathan Emmett
Illustrated by Poly Bernatene
New York: Walker & Co., 2011.

When a new baby princess accidentally changes places with a piglet, both of their lives are forever changed.

Whoosh!: Lonnie Johnson's Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions
By Chris Barton
Illustrated by Don Tate
Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge, 2016.

Chronicles the life and achievements of the NASA engineer and inventor, from his childhood to his accidental invention of the Super Soaker water gun.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...

Review: Blood in the Water

Blood in the Water By Tiffany D. Jackson New York: Scholastic, 2025. Fiction. 255 pages. 12-year-old Kaylani McKinnon can't help but feel like a fish out of water. She's a Brooklyn girl spending her summer on Martha's Vineyard surrounded by wealthy family friends in their mansion. All she really wants is to stay home all summer where she her incarcerated father can easily reach her, and she can keep working to find ways to prove him innocent of fraud and embezzlement. Despite her protests, she finds herself on the island with the snooty granddaughters of her host. Soon after Kaylani's arrival, a popular teen boy is found murdered and she decides to conduct her own investigation. As she tries to discover what happened to Chadwick Cooper, Kaylani finds that not everything on Martha's Vineyard is as perfect as it appears. Thrillers for middle grade readers can be hard to find, but Tiffany D. Jackson succeeds in her first middle grade novel. A quick moving plot, tight d...

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.