My favourite book is The Mermaid Princess by Shirley Barber. The main characters in the book are a mermaid princess named Marina, a pixie named Sandy, the pet dolphin Silverfin, the king and the queen. Sandy lives in a sand castle decorated with bits of green and white seas smoothed glass. Every morning he pushes his little cart along the tide line to see what has been washed up. He usually finds something useful such as sea shells to keep things in or sticks for his fire. One morning Sandy comes across a beautiful mermaid sitting amongst the coral. She tells him that her name is Marina and that she is a princess. She has been chased by a shark and cut her tail on some sharp coral as she clambered ashore. Because of her injured tail she cannot swim very fast and she is too frightened to go back into the sea. Sandy is a seashore pixie who can breathe underwater and he rowed his little boat out to sea and down the ocean floor to find the mermaid princess’s parents, the king and queen.
Ishaneera Kavindi Thambavita,
Grade 8,
St. Michael’s College,
Negombo.