In addition to the numerous fine things that I learned at this year’s UELMA conference, I had the great luck of receiving copies of the shortlists of the 2011 Beehive Book Award Nominees. These lists were a key acquisition because all of the elementary librarians in my school district need to hurry and order these books with what’s left of their budgets before this year’s budgets are frozen, BUT WE HAVEN’T KNOWN WHICH BOOKS TO BUY.  It was therefore imperative that I obtain this information.  I succeeded, with one exception: I only went to the elementary session of CLAU’s presentation, so I did not get my hands on a copy of the young adult fiction list.

In the hopes of rectifying this oversight, I checked the CLAU web site, the UELMA web site, and the UELMA conference wiki, but none of these sites are yet endowed with such a list.  It turns out that the people of the Children’s Literature Association of Utah, although great at picking out their nominees and booktalking them at the conference, aren’t that quick at updating their web site.  Well, that’s okay, neither am I.  Getting desperate, I then consulted my friends Google, Bing, and Twitter, in the hopes that some insider or fanatic had posted this info on their blog or tweeted about it, but the only semi-relevant hits these engines gave me was someone’s beehive-2011-long-list shelf on Goodreads, and one guy’s tweet from UELMA.  It turns out that Utah’s school librarians aren’t exactly Twitter fanatics.  A true librarian, unlike the wanna-be librarian that I am, may point out that it is less effective to choose these popular search engines when researching information.  However, I stand by my methods, as I have little faith that any database or resource on Pioneer will help with this research problem at this point in time.

It was at that point that I realized something. Because there is apparently nothing out there about these new nominees in the electronic world, if I were to publish the lists here on my blog (purely as an informational/journalistic service, of course), I would possibly become one of the top search results for “2011 beehive nominees,” and also I myself would become that fanatic that I was searching for.  This has proved to be an opportunity I can’t pass up, so, without further ado, here are the 2011 Beehive Book Award Nominees in every category except for young adult fiction. If anyone out there in bloggie land has that young adult list and feels like sharing, holla back in the comments. YA nominees now added! I hope that CLAU doesn’t blacklist me from joining now that I have scooped their own website.

Congratulations to all the nominees!

2011 Beehive Children’s Fiction Award Nominees

• 11 Birthdays by Wendy Mass (Scholastic)
• The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones by Helen Hemphill (Front Street)
• Binky the Space Cat by Ashley Spires (Kids Can Press)
• The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (Henry Holt)
• Extra Credit by Andrew Clements (Atheneum/Simon & Shuster)
• The Leanin’ Dog by K. A. Nuzum (Joanna Cotler Books)
• Me and the Pumpkin Queen by Marlane Kennedy (Greenwillow)
• Mudville by Kurtis Scaletta (Alfred A. Knopf/Yearling Books)
• Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (Little, Brown)
• The Year the Swallows Came Early by Kathryn Fitzmaurice (Bowen Press/HarperCollins)

2011 Young Adult Book Nominees

• Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen (Viking)
• Brooklyn Nine: a Novel in Nine Innings by Alan Gartz (Dial/Puffin)
• The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams (St. Martin’s Griffin)
• Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (Simon & Schuster / Atheneum)
• The Compound by S.A. Bodeen (Feiwel & Friends / Square Fish)
• *The Devil’s Paintbox by Victoria McKernan (Alfred A. Knopf)
• *Eon: Dragoneye Reborn by Alison Goodman (Viking / Firebird)
• Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith (Putnam / Speak)
• Musician’s Daughter by Susanne Dunlap (Bloomsbury)
• My Fair Godmother by Janette Rallison (Walker & Co.)
• Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George (Bloomsbury)
• Project Sweet Life by Brent Hartinger (HarperTeen)

(* = “mature readers”)

2011 Picture Book Nominees

• The Apple-Pip Princess by Jane Ray (Candlewick Press)
• Birds by Kevin Henkes; illustrated by Laura Dronzek (Greenwillow)
• That Book Woman by Heather Henson; illustrated by David Small (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
• Chicken Cheeks by Michael Ian Black; illustrated by Kevin Hawkes (Simon & Schuster)
• The Circus Ship by Chris Van Dusen (Candlewick Press)
• Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal; illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld (Chronicle Books)
• Higher! Higher! by Leslie Patricelli (Candlewick Press)
• Just What Mama Needs by Sharlee Glenn (Harcourt)
• Most Loved in All the World by Tonya Hegamin; illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera (Houghton Mifflin)
• Tsunami by Kimiko Kajikawa; illustrated by Ed Young (Philomel)

2011 Informational Book Nominees

• 14 Cows for America by Carmen Deedy and Thomas Gonzalez (Peachtree Publishers)
• Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone (Candlewick Press)
• The Boy Who Invented TV: the Story of Philo Farnsworth by Kathleen Krull and Greg Couch (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Darwin by Alice McGinty and Mary Azarian (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children)
• Down, Down, Down: a Journey to the Bottom of the Sea by Steve Jenkins (Houghton Mifflin)
• George Washington Carver by Tonya Bolden (Abrams Books for Young Readers)
• Life in the Wild: George Shaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts by Pamela S. Turner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Mermaid Queen: the Spectacular True Story of Annette Kellerman, Who Swam Her Way to Fame, Fortune & Swimsuit History by Shana Corey (Scholastic)
• Nic Bishop Frogs by Nic Bishop (Scholastic)
• You Never Heard of Sandy Kofax? by Jonah Winter and Andre Carriho (Schwartz and Wade)

2011 Poetry Nominees

• Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face by Jack Prelutsky (Greenwillow)
• The Bill Martin Jr. Big Book of Poetry edited by Bill Martin Jr. (Simon & Schuster)
• Button Up: Wrinkled Rhymes by Alice Schertle (Harcourt)
• Dinothesaurus: Prehistoric Poems and Paintings by Douglas Florian
• Far From You by Lisa Schroeder (Simon Pulse)
• A Fuzzy-Fast Blur: Poems about Pets by Laura Salas (Capstone Press)
• Partly Cloudy: Poems of Love and Longing by Gary Soto (Harcourt)
• Truckery Rhymes by Jon Scieszka (Simon & Schuster)
• The Underwear Salesman: Jobs for Better or Verse by J. Patrick Lewis (Ginee Seo Books)
• Whiff of Pine, Hint of Skunk by Deborah Ruddell (Margaret K. McElderry)

A Book Review

Kate DiCamillo can render vivid and stunning scenes with simplicity. She can create heartbreak with a single sentence. She can lead you line by line through a story and have you hanging on every word. Her seemingly magical mastery of tone is perhaps unparalleled in contemporary children’s literature. The problem with DiCamillo comes when one recognizes that she could potentially use this incredible linguistic power to enchant the reader with any story, however poorly plotted or characterized. Mesmerized by the charisma of her written word, we may not even realize that we were actually reading a very silly book. Now, I’m not saying that The Magician’s Elephant is a silly book. I’m just saying that I am so drawn in by DiCamillo’s writing style that it doesn’t really matter what tale she’s telling, I want to read and hear the whole of it.

So, the tale at hand: Peter Augustus Duchene, an orphan boy in an imaginary European city, is sent to the market with money given him by his guardian, an aging, ailing soldier. Instead of buying bread and fish, he gives the money to a fortune teller. She informs him that his deepest hope is true: his sister is alive. Furthermore, in a perplexing and cryptic instruction, the fortune teller counsels Peter that an elephant will lead him to his sister. Two days later, a magician, performing before the rich and noble of the city, intends to produce a bouquet of lilies for the audience. Instead, in a burst of hubris, he calls forth an elephant. It crashes through the roof of the opera house and lands in the lap of one Madame LaVaughn, permanently crippling her legs. The magician is imprisoned, and the citizens of the entire city, most especially Peter, become obsessed with the portentous pachyderm, very much still in existence but hidden in an undisclosed location in the city. A succession of short scenes given from the perspectives of numerous characters, including the hapless elephant herself, moves the story towards some magical eventuality that promises to provide something great for everyone, i.e., a happy ending.

My only complaint with the story is that, unlike the endings of traditional fairy tales, DiCamillo perhaps spreads the happy ending too thin between too many characters; many of them do not seem to have passed through the extreme magic-curse-based ordeals which are usually required to earn a fairy tale ending. Instead, they have passed through more realistic ordeals: disease, loneliness, guilt, poverty, etc. In a relatively short book such as this, these trials and burdens don’t necessarily impress themselves as strongly on a reader as, say, being pursued by a man-eating giant or being forced to live in a castle with a monster. The magic displayed in the book is as out-of-the-ordinary to the characters in the story as it is to us; DiCamillo clearly wanted this magic to happen in some place resembling the real world.  Even the elephant, who the other characters look to as a magical being, does not consider herself magical and is as confused and powerless as anyone to the magic that has occurred.  She’s just an elephant that has suddenly found herself in a strange, cold place without friends.   DiCamillo is quoted on the back flap of the book as saying, “I wanted, I needed, I longed to tell a story of love and magic.” It may be that the book, although dealing with magic, is more a fable than a fairy tale; all along the way, we read scenes that illustrate despair and hope, empathy, perseverance, charity, and forgiveness. Perhaps the magic DiCamillo so longs for the reader to see is nothing other than love itself, and thus it is only appropriate that she would want to spread it around to as many characters as possible.

Stylistically, as well as story-wise, DiCamillo walks the line between fairy tale, fable, and magical realism. The book is filled with beautiful, imagistic scenes and dreams that are described with the succinctness and surrealism of prose poems. The magical elements are reported matter-of-fact-ly alongside the many realistic elements of the story. Cold, overcast skies and snow storms are so vividly realized, right down to the footprints of the elephant in the snow, that the reader more readily identifies with what the characters are feeling. Sly authorial interjections do occasionally pop up in the text, (“And what did the magician say? You know full well the words he spoke,”) but they do not seem to be as pervasive as they were in Desperaux. For better or for worse, this time around we don’t receive any of the author’s idiosyncratic definitions (although there certainly are a lot of new vocabulary words for young readers in this book.) As in her other books, the strong built-in storytelling voice lends itself to a great read-aloud experience.

All in all, we have another magical little book from DiCamillo. Is the story ridiculous? You know full well it’s ridiculous; all fairy tales and fantasies are. It is nonetheless a beautifully rendered and engaging book, filled with fables of hope, empathy, forgiveness, humility, and love that will speak to children and adults alike. Four-and-a-half stars.

The Magician’s Elephant
Written by Kate DiCamillo
Illustrated by Yoko Tanaka
200 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7636-4410-9
Release Date: September 8, 2009
www.themagicianselephant.com
www.katedicamillo.com
www.yokotanaka.com