An engine fails, and a pilot finds himself stranded alone in the desert: sand, silence, and stars his only companions.
Then a voice calls out beside him with a strange request: "Draw me a sheep?" It is the Little Prince, a boy from a distant planet who keeps the pilot company with his innocent yet philosophical stories until the plane is ready to fly again.
Now the Little Prince must return to his planet—a star—leaving his body behind, for it has grown too heavy. But it will be like shedding an old shell. Old shells are not sad... What matters most cannot be seen."
At first glance, this may seem merely a fantasy, a book for children's imagination—and it should be read with their innocence.
Woven through it, one discovers true dimensions of human life: the peculiarity of "grown-ups" who lack imagination and poetry; the blindness of those who call themselves "important" and think only of themselves—the vain man, the businessman, the drunkard (all characters in the book)—folded inward on their selfish egos; the meaning of true friendship and loyalty to it, when the Prince says to the pilot, "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important"; the gift children possess—the Little Prince—to marvel at small things, like a flower opening, and the mystery of their tears, which sometimes ask only for understanding and contemplation.
The Little Prince is a character as unique as every being; yet with a closer look—"eyes are blind. You must look with the heart"—we may feel we have already met or heard this child. In the fragility of his being lies the fragility of every small person; in his words, the wisdom and questions children so often place before us; in his unexpected, uncomfortable, and ever mysterious presence beside the pilot, there may be a profound echo of how children move through their families and our world today.