Jagged mountains rise from the column of the book's spine and the figures of various characters that the Prince encounters in his celestial travels march across the tale like a regiment of paper soldiers. When the prince, released from his vow by the flower, begins to travel to other planets, the pages grow thick with inventive paper landscapes. Masses of entwined balboa trees burst from the pages like a riot of pernicious weeds. As the classic tale unfolds and we learn more about the Little Prince's miniature home planet, the pop-up art evolves into cratered orbs that spin at the pull of a tab or twist their flower clustered faces to the warmth of a rising sun stretching above the page. Beginning pages are full of hidden doors, windows and flaps that contain treasures of minuscule fold out animals and tiny doodles. The book begins with the Little Prince himself, being held aloft from the title page by a harnessed flock of birds, the white and pale gray of each wing a stark contrast to the enveloping black mass of the space that surrounds him. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry proclaims himself no "great artist" and this pop-up book stays true to the delicate pastels of the watercolors he used to create The Little Prince's illustrations.
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