In her new picture book, Dragon Tide, Toronto writer and teacher Ingrid Lee taps the typical childhood experience of working hard on a sand sculpture only to see it wrecked by other people or the tide itself. Her story explores a child’s fantasy – if a sculpture survived the day, would something magical happen?

An unusual girl fashions a dragon out of sand while two children watch. As she leaves the beach, she tells them the dragon will come to life if touched by the night tide. So the children protect the sculpture, and witness its animation at the end of the day.

Unfortunately, the characters, unlike the dragon, never come to life. We see them react to the enchantment unfolding, but we do not feel it with them. This limitation is a result of Lee’s prose, an uneasy mixture of vivid description and sentimentality. “Fine sand coated her skin and hair, like white sugar sprinkled over toast” is characteristic of her more effective images, while ending the book with the children flinging “out their hands to catch a star falling” sinks into mawkish territory.

Vancouverite Soizick Meister’s illustrations capture the whimsy of the story. The strange girl sports hair like a dragon’s flame, and reptilian appendages turn up everywhere in the flora on the beach. She succeeds with a bright but limited palette of blues, greens, reds, and golds. A charming anthropomorphized moon smiles down on the last pages.

The plot and artwork of the book show potential, but the prose style, and general remoteness of the characters, leave it feeling flat.