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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN num: 9780374444587
ISBN number: 0374444587
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 110
Printing Date: August 01, 1984
Publishing house: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Age index: Ages 4-8
Sale Popularity Level: 86579
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The Light Princess--the princess who 'lost her gravity'--has been essential fiction for several generations of children. This new edition is a companion volume (same page size, similar design) to our edition of The Golden Key, of which Publishing houses' Weekly said: 'Maurice Sendak lights the way through MacDonald's Kingdom with the most mystical, the most poetic pictures of his distinguished career.' Now Sendak has made the pictures The Light Princess always deserved to have.
This is the only separate edition available that preserves the authentic text; it is neither cut nor edited nor 'improved' in any way.
Amazon.com Review:
The fact that George MacDonald--a scholar as well as a preacher and writer--once read this fairy tale to his students instead of giving them a lecture says volumes about the man and his beliefs. It also says much about his faith in the power of stories. The Light Princess is a simple enough tale, clearly written for children--a princess at her christening is cursed by a wicked witch with lightness (she floats blissfully about the castle all day long, and gets into all sorts of adventures, as one can easily imagine)--yet it holds a powerful spiritual truth. Gravity, weight, sorrow, suffering--all of this the princess misses, but with all of these she misses love, for what is love without weight, without body? What is love without falling? She discovers this truth, of course, only at the last minute when a faithful prince loves her enough to die for her.
Sometimes it's not a ponderous lecture--or sermon--that we need in order to experience what incarnation is about. --Doug Thorpe.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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This fairy tale by George MacDonald is about a charming, but bewitched Princess, a Prince in disguise, some nice fairies, and one very bad one. It is easy to like the main characters. Children will enjoy the fact that the adults are rather foolish and even the bad witch is not really scary. This is a nice story for parents to read to young children and then discuss behaviors and conduct.
Richard Pendleton
Rated by buyers -
This review will only cover the basics:
I have loved this story since I was a child. Still, this edition is not quite what I remember.
1) This edition does not feature illustrations by Maurice Sendak. Instead, it features a few (about 4) colored etching-type illustrations by Arthur Hughes.
2) The cover page says "unabridged". As I do not have the one I read as a child, I cannot say this is false, but I remember it to be a full-size novel. This edition is about the size of a pocket calculator: 3"X4.5". The font size is about a 10. Yet, each chapter is only a few pages long and the total page count is 131.
This edition claims to be unabridged from MacDonald's 1867 edition of the story included in a collection of fairy tales. As fairly tale collections are frequently abridged stories, I wonder if this edition is claiming to be unabridged from an edition that itself was shortened.
I purchased this copy cheap, knowing there must be a reason for it. Therefore, I was not disappointed. Still, I have now also purchased the edition with Sendak as illustrator.
For a pocket book, I find this to be very nice. Still, if you are unfamiliar with the story, I would recommend a different edition.
Rated by buyers -
Once I heard about The Light Princess, I ordered it because I buy everything by Robin McKinley, and I have a soft spot for George MacDonald (The Princess and the Goblin). I have not read the original of this, but wanted to see how McKinley would rewrite a classic tale.
The book is pretty but not beautiful, and the story is charming but a bit flat to my taste. In addition, the final change in the princess from careless to concerned seemed unmotivated and hence not quite believable. I think it's a fine book to have in your library, but not worth chasing down too hard.
Rated by buyers 
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The Light Princess has no flaws. I have never read a fairy tale that made me laugh so hard--my wife and I could hardly catch our breaths at the beginning of the story. And then we cried at the end; the symbolism is strikingly powerful. As good as this book is, however, I like one George MacDonald book better: The Lost Princess, although that book is hard to find outside of an anthology. If you can ever find The Lost Princess, however, you find another masterpiece. For the record, my -wife- likes The Light Princess better: I guess there's no accounting for taste! ;)
Rated by buyers -
When I received this as a gift, I had already read and thoroughly delighted in "At the Back of the North Wind," "The Princess and the Goblin," "The Princess and Curdie," and "The Golden Key." When you read MacDonald, if your heart is right, you feel sheltered--the world he creates for you is as trustworthy and pure as C. S. Lewis's Narnia or Rivendell of Tolkien's Middle Earth. At the same time, you feel challenged to transform your own world and make it more like MacDonald's.
I was expecting another dose of the same awe-inspiring goodness without false piety or preachiness that is MacDonald's literary legacy. In "The Light Princess," however, there was an unexpected ingredient--a sharp wit that pervades the whole book and made me laugh out loud more than once. In a modern world where wit and vulgarity are viewed as conjoined twins, how satisfying a book this is! MacDonald infused delicious humour into his characters without losing the innocence. I fell in love with this book by page three, and it has surpassed "The Princess and the Goblin" as my favorite work of George MacDonald.
The fact that my favorite illustrator of all time, Maurice Sendak, added his talents to this book is icing on the cake. Sendak always grabs the heart and soul of the written work and renders it into drawings too evocative to be believed. The drawing of the prince with only his head above the water took my breath away, and in one fabulous illustration, the hilarious expression on the face of the gravity-deprived infant princess as she floats away reflects the hilarity of the story itself.
If some of MacDonald's other stories have turned you off because they are too long, too "deep" or whatever, don't miss this treasure as a result. It is MacDonald-Light, and by that I mean not only easy to read, but typically illumined with beauty and truth. Plus, it's a love story that pokes fun of its own sentimentality. Anyone not brain-dead and heart-numb ought to adore it.
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