The book is a wonderful satire of the various pomposities of adulthood. The idea that adults have that they know what is important and that, often, it is the tangible and not that essential invisible love. It satirises the king who gives orders to no end but to exert authority, the business man who seeks ownership without purpose and many others. At the end of his meetings with them the Little Prince usually says something along the lines of "The grown-ups are certainly very, very odd." Interestingly, all of these characters are male, perhaps indicitive of a male tendency towards pomposity - something that perhaps can develop out of a lack of constraint under the patriarchy. The character the Prince respects more is the lamplighter who he sees as someone doing something not just for himself, and this thread of thinking of and caring for others runs through the whole book. I particularly like the central and pivotal importance of the Little Prince's rose and the discussion that finding other roses leads him to have with a fox as he works out what it is that makes someone special to someone else. I love the illustrations of the book, and one of my favourites is the one below right of the lone rose among the stars.

One of the lovely things about this book is that it works on so many levels, it can be taken as an allegory for all sorts of things or as the story of a boy and his journey. There is often a bit of a tendency when talking about children's books to talk about the subsurface "adult" interpretation as the true meaning but, as The Little Prince talks about the wisdom of children and their ability to see truth, perhaps our searching for allegory is to rather miss the point that this is largely a book about a boy's thoughts and feelings, about his home and about the places and people he sees and cares for.

At the beginning I said that this this book was made special for me because of how I encountered it. I would have loved this book if I had just picked it up and read it but I love it all the more because it was read to me by a very special friend. There is a magic in sharing books with another person that adults often forget. To be read a book by someone or to read a book to them is to build a castle of associations reminding you of that person and that time and how it made you feel. This is why so many of the books that people have deep emotional connections to are children's books, they are books that resonate of people and of places and of feelings. As adults we sometimes categorise that away in our picture of the world as something done with and for children but, as the Little Prince shows us, we should all embrace that childish side of us that longs to share stories with others. In doing so we create shared memories of our journey into the world of a book in a similar way to the shared memories of travelling with a person and the shared context that provides. In this way books become more than the sum of their parts, when we pick them up we are transported to a time, a place, a person, a set of memories and we make them our own. Being read a book has the wonderful, comforting feeling of someone putting their arms around you because it is a taking of time and a demonstration of care, a want to share that construct of memories together. A book read with someone else can also be a bit like a guided tour from someone with local knowledge, someone familiar with the book can point out some of the treasures it holds which might be missed on a first read. An example of this is when Silvia (the aforementioned friend) talked to me about the idea that the baobabs in the book which require constant pruning when small lest they grow big enough to pull things apart might have been written as an allegory for facism, something that opens up another way to see the book. So I will end this review with a question and an encouragment. When did you last read a book outloud to an adult? When did you last have one read to you? Do it, The Little Prince might say it is a matter of the greatest consequence in the world.