The Little Prince

written by Sneha Prasad

edited by Vanshika

Providence

That is the word that comes to my mind when I think about The Little Prince.

This book finds you and alters you as though someone has rearranged your organs and your interiors. It dissolves the lines between childhood and adolescence. It's a vestige of how childhood used to be—simple, dripping in golden sunlight where we saw a boa constrictor digesting an elephant instead of a hat.

It's a journey of loss, friendship, how many roses are enough for us, and how ephemeral all of it is. The Little Prince lands in a desert after leaving his planet. Along his journey, he encounters characters who become stand-ins of human beings: from a businessman who always counts his wealth to a red-haired man who has never looked at the stars.

He finally lands on Earth, and as fate would have it, meets our narrator. What follows is a tender exploration of friendship and love—showing that if you've tamed something, you become forever responsible for it. It's about memory, about love that lingers and the one that doesn’t last. Because we search for something all our lives, and what we’re looking for can be found in a single rose or in a single drop of water.

It is whimsical and yet sagaciously rooted in reality. It's about the magic we knew as kids and how it turns foreign as adults. The book is dreamlike and idyllic, like our protagonist, The Little Prince.

It makes us wonder why we ever stopped believing in unicorns or pretended to like blue instead of pink because we needed to grow up.

It's for children, but most importantly, it teaches adults how to see the world in colours again, to look at the stars again. It deals with the feeling of being away from home, feeling fragmented and unstable with no solid ground. It is about the love we leave behind but never quite forget. You can read this book at 8, at 20, or at 60, and it will always stretch itself for you and make space for your heart.

It will make you wonder: what are you looking for? What can you never forget? And how some friendships end, yet we still end up with so much love in our hands.

It seems to me this book has glitter, and whenever you read it, you leave shiny and anew. As I end this review, it’s not with the hope that you will read it, but that you will go back for your rose—not be the red-haired man who has never seen the stars—but always hold hands with your younger self and believe in boa constrictors. To get older, but not old.