The Light Princess

In George MacDonald's The Light Princess, a baby is cursed at her christening and grows up unable to feel any gravity at all.

An offended aunt casts the spell the day the princess is born: no weight, and no seriousness either. The girl drifts through the palace like a soap bubble, bumping along ceilings, laughing at funerals, unable to take anything to heart — including her own danger. The one place she feels any pull downward is the palace lake, where she can finally swim instead of float, and where she spends most of her days.

A prince finds her there, swimming alone at night, and falls for her slowly, even though she can't seem to love anyone back with any real weight of feeling. Their quiet meetings in the water end when the lake itself begins to vanish, drained by the same old grudge that cursed her. The only way to save it, an old book says, is for someone to fill the hole with his own body until the water rises again — and to give his life doing it, unless the princess can shed one true tear. What follows is a race against a sinking lake, and a girl who has never cried learning, at last, what it costs to feel something all the way through.

It's a Victorian fairy tale built on a clever premise, part gentle satire and part romance, in the same shelf as Hans Christian Andersen or Lewis Carroll's stranger, more philosophical moments. Readers who like their fairy tales a little odd and a little wise — with a princess who has to learn gravity, literally, before she can love anyone — will feel right at home here.

The lake and the moonlight do their work at a slow pace. It's a short, strange, sweet story, well suited to a dark room and closed eyes, drifting off right alongside its floating princess.