Reviews

The Little Prince is a children’s book for adults or an adult book for children. Its hero is from another planet, but it isn’t science fiction. It’s a book about growing up and forgetting ‘trivial’ childish things, like what makes the things you love special and different to all of the other things of the same kind, what beauty and love and friendship are. Grown-ups concentrate on really important things, such as bridge and golf and politics and neckties.

The Little Prince loves sunsets and lives on his tiny planet with his flower, who he looks after and believes is unique in all the world. But before he really knows how to love her, he has to find out what is really important in life. On his travels, he meets a king who rules over all the planets, a businessman who owns them, man who is ashamed that he is always drunk, and gets drunk because he is ashamed, a geographer who doesn’t know where anything is, because there are no explorers, a conceited man, waiting alone on his planet for someone to admire him and a lamplighter on a planet with a sunset every minute.

On Earth, he meets the narrator of the story, tames a fox, and meets a snake who speaks in riddles. It is a lovely book for children and grown-ups who can still remember being children. It’s philosophy is simple, but profound, because it is about the real things in life and not the ‘important’ ones.