"And He Lay Down on the Grass and Cried" - The Little Prince : A Book Review

You have to admit that as kids, you'd see the interests of adults are weird. What's all the fuss with jobs, money and economics? Politics? Why won't adults stop to admire the naivety of the flowers, the beauty of the stars? That's what the Little Prince thinks, too.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is a wonderful book, with a strange-and-simple story about a little prince that arrives on the earth's Sahara. He meets the narrator, a pilot that crashed on the same desert. In the book, the prince tells his adventure to the pilot, about the oddness of the adults, and often wondering about why adults are interested in 'matters of consequence'. The book's plot is simple and understandable, but significant. Oftentimes, you yourself would stop to think about this, wondering all along why.

It's a very beautiful book, and with equally beautiful locales and characters. A geographer, a tippler, a lamplighter, a businessman, a garden of roses, a planet with three volcanoes (two of which are active) and the realization of a man that's becoming more like the adults who see nothing and think about nothing more important than 'matters of consequence'. You are introduced to the various views of adult life (one of which is drinking) from the eyes of the innocent prince, who takes time to watch the stars, to see that his planet is one of them, and to see that each of the stars have flowers, just like his own planet.

Through his telling, the pilot slowly takes his point of view, and is taught by the prince to see that in one of the stars, the little prince is laughing there, and all the other stars would laugh.

The book is simple, but the story is very nice. The illustrations are also great, hand-drawn by Mr. Exupery.