The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess

A king and a queen who lack only children to make their happiness complete, each take the initiative to rectify the situation. The king goes to the royal inventor and requests a boy robot. The inventor creates one out of wood. The queen goes to a wise old witch and asks her for a girl. The witch

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enchants a log to create a princess. The two wooden siblings and their parents all “loved each other instantly.”

However, each night when the princess falls asleep, she turns back into a log. But each morning her robot brother recites the magic words, “Awake, little log, awake,” and then she awakens again a perfect princess. Alas, one morning excited to find a traveling circus in the courtyard. Excited the prince rushes downstairs to see it. Alack, when he returns to wake his sister, her bed is empty. An uninformed maid has thrown the log out the window, not recognizing that this was the sleeping princess. The log has rolled down the hill and been picked up by a passing goblin who adds it to his pile of logs that he sells to a ship sailing north with a load of timber. By the time the prince catches up to her the log princess she is mixed up with the rest of the pile of logs on the ship. and he must travel to the north until journey’s end to sort through the pile to find the log that’s his sister. Then they must make the long walk home, which is a trek filled with trials and adventures for both of them.

Gauld’s distinctive style, with lines as distinctive as those of Hergé, and his compact pictorial wit make this fairy tale a gentle delight to read, view, savor, and read aloud to children.

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