A new story by Robert Munsch, illustrated by Michael Martchenko – knowing that, what more do you need? However: in The Sandcastle Contest, a happy-looking family stacks their trailer high with boats and barbecues and vacuums and kitchen sinks and heads off for a summer camping vacation. Matthew, the youngest, thinks they should have included the sandbox. The first thing he does upon their arrival at a campground is hit the beach, where a sandcastle contest is in full swing. He rises to the challenge with a sand house, complete with sand TV, sand bedroom, and sand fridge full of sand food. After some confusion on the judges’ part (they think the house is real), Matthew wins the contest…. and then makes himself a sand dog who becomes real (he always wanted one, you see).

After more than 40 books, Munsch is Canada’s best-known and best-selling children’s writer, and Martchenko is his most frequent and most recognizable collaborator. The two break no new ground in The Sandcastle Contest, and, as usual, there’s no real point to the story (beyond “kids, yay!”). Munsch is more of a storyteller than a stylist, so the words on the page can feel a little slack and undynamic to a silent reader, though they work just fine for someone reading to a young group.

Munsch’s books are aimed at readers between the ages of three and eight, but the perpetually upbeat tone and lack of real drama probably keep them to the lower end of that range. Munsch and Martchenko always do a good job together of creating storybooks that are (mostly) cutesy-free, filled with likeable, self-confident kids whose primary imperative is to have fun. But this new book lacks a good hook – such as the gross-out factor of 2004’s Smelly Socks – making it less memorable than some of their other collaborations.