the little prince by antoine de saint exupery book review

The flower (the object of the little prince’s affection) is selfish and harsh friendship and taming are presented as strangely absolute but with little benefit to either party, and there is an overarching feeling of futility through it all. Or if they picked up on the motifs, they might get the wrong idea. At the time the author was a man who was tired of “matters of consequence”, as it were.Īnd that desire to go back to being childlike doesn’t seem like something children would enjoy. It’s a tale of childhood imagination and love made while the author had recently seen his country defeated by Nazis and was living discontentedly in the Americas. And I feel that the story wouldn’t resonate as much with children or early teenagers as it would with the adults it appears to me it was obviously written for. While most morals in children’s literature are dubious, quite often the ones on display here aren’t particularly good. Supposedly it is a children’s book, but I might have to disagree. And even if you don’t think it’s as great as I do, it is very short (after all, it is ostensibly a children’s book) and a good chunk of its page length is taken up by the illustrations. But it comes back with a wonderfully emotional, if heavily telegraphed, ending.

This wanes slightly as it moves into the mildly monotonous recitation of the prince’s adventures coming to and on earth.

The first portion of the book, where the author is talking about himself and then meeting the Little Prince is thoroughly entertaining and engrossing. As they talk the pilot learns more about the prince, an astral child living in a world of whimsy (and adults “unfortunately”) and relays this information to the reader. The story is simple: a pilot crashes in the desert and meets the little prince while trying to fix his plane. And upon starting it up I was captivated from the dedication (a good dedication is something you don’t see very often). I knew very little of the book, save that it was an illustrated “children’s book” and the titular prince lived on a small planet (asteroid).

The little prince by antoine de saint exupery book review