The Sandcastle Contest

Sylvia Pantaleo is an associate professor of education, specializing in
children’s literature, at the University of Victoria. She is the
co-author of Learning with Literature in the Canadian Elementary
Classroom.

Matthew’s family is preparing to depart on their summer vacation, for
which they are figuratively and literally packing everything including
the kitchen sink. Their first stop is the beach where Matthew meets
Kalita, a girl building a sand structure to enter into a sandcastle
contest. Once he learns that the prize is a bathtub full of ice cream,
Matthew decides to enter the competition as well. He constructs a sand
house that is so realistic that two judges believe it to be a real
house. Of course, the child proves the adults wrong; Matthew wins the
contest and is rewarded with the ice cream. Thanks to Kalita, he also
gets something else that he always wanted.

The book’s plot and characters are predictable; however,
Martchenko’s clever and amusing illustrations are a visual delight. A
secondary narrative about a group of squirrels is told entirely through
illustrations. The squirrels’ actions are comical as they parody
numerous human behaviours. Many of the entries for the sandcastle
contest are intertextual connections to well-known buildings (e.g., the
Eiffel Tower, the leaning Tower of Pisa, the CN Tower). Martchenko also
includes several satirically illustrative comments about aspects of
human behaviour. Recommended.