The Pilot and the Little Prince

March 3, 2014
Following biographies of Darwin and Galileo, Sís celebrates legendary pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944). As in The Tree of Life, Sís supplements a main narrative with time lines and insets, wrapping squint-inducing italics around dreamlike illustrations. Readers learn about Saint-Exupéry’s fascination with flight and roles as a mail and military pilot. The spreads allude to Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la lune and map Saint-Exupéry’s North African mail routes, without examining WWI or colonial history. Sís crafts expansive, nostalgic palimpsests, illustrating the hero’s adventures with precision ink dots on sepia ground, yet he writes with emotional distance. Readers may wonder why Saint-Exupéry’s father, brother, and sister died young; why “hostile nomads” objected to his Moroccan outpost; why his wife has a Spanish name; and how he and his friends survived multiple plane crashes. Sís recounts astounding feats in an offhand tone (two fliers landed their plane “on a ledge” in the Andes, then “rocked it until it went over the edge and started up”). Gorgeous, densely imagined, yet fragmented in its telling, this narrative will send readers beyond The Little Prince to hear more of this mind-boggling story. Ages 5–9.

Starred review from April 1, 2014
What was essential about one golden-haired boy in love with flying becomes visible in Sis' richly visual biographical portrait of French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Sis covers the basics: Saint-Exupery briefly studied architecture, then was a pioneer air mail pilot and began to publish his stories. Assigned to the mail station at Cape Juby in the Spanish Sahara, "he loved the solitude and being under millions of stars." He spent two of the war years exiled in New York and finally returned to fly for France. Sis' work invites readers to take time, to attend to the narrative in both the straightforward text and the nuanced, complex pictures. Antoine's pilot friend Guillaumet advises him "to follow the face of the landscape": A small plane flies over faces in the dunes (perhaps a nod to Saint-Exupery's Terres des Hommes). A desert fox greets one of Antoine's several crashes, but instead of direct speculation about Saint-Exupery's inspiration for The Little Prince, Sis offers a multifaceted look at the author as adventurer and dreamer. Saint-Exupery disappeared over the sea near Corsica in 1944: In Sis' poignant illustration, the lines of the Lockheed P-38 become the wings and bicycle of a flying machine, a little like one Antoine made as a child. Extraordinary and wonderful. (Picture book/biography. 6-12)

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Starred review from April 1, 2014

Gr 4 Up-As in his works about other restless souls who charted their courses by the stars and pondered big questions (Columbus, Galileo, Darwin), Sis's picture-book biography of the famous French aviator and author comprises multiple layers. Trim but informative sentences ground the pages where text appears ("When he was four years old, his father died unexpectedly. The boy wondered, Where did he go?"). Sensitive readers will follow that question into the heart of the story that encompasses Saint-Exupery's childhood, passion for flying, experiences with military and commercial planes, multiple crashes, risk-taking temperament, friendships, marriage, and publications. Dates, places, events, and exploits swirl around smaller images framed cleverly with bubbles, sequential panels, maps, or airplanes. The emotional content comes through the changing colors and compositions of Sis's exquisite double spreads. Many are wordless, as when the pilot stands at the edge of the vast turquoise ocean; above the horizon, twinkling yellow stars form the curls and eyes of the title character of The Little Prince. Sis is as adept at drama (the red paint bleeding from the sky as the Germans bomb France) as he is at subtle humor (an aerial view of Manhattan portrays the city as an alligator-shaped landmass emerging from a sewer). Slyly inserted referents, from an elephant inside a "hat" to a Melies moon, add meaning. Sis's handling of the aviator's last flight and disappearance strikes just the right notes of mystery, majesty, and quiet wonder that connect the life and longings of Saint-Exupery to those of his young, fictional friend. Brilliant bookmaking.-Wendy Lukehart, District of Columbia Public Library

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Starred review from March 15, 2014
Grades 1-4 *Starred Review* S-s' works are less picture books than little miracles of design, a craft he now devotes to a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exup'ry, author of The Little Prince. That de Saint-Exup'ry's life was interesting in its own rightgrowing up fatherless, pioneering ever-more dangerous airmail delivery routes, flying in WWIIis nearly beside the point, because S-s has created such a compelling, multilayered visual treat. The writing itself occupies three levels: one at the bottom of the page tells the exciting but bare-bones story, ideal for younger children looking for a general overview; a second level directly above offers small, colorful details captioned with succinct facts; and the third offers more complex factual information integrated into the images. And what images they are! Multifaceted and evocative, they capture the mile-a-second swirl of a little boy's imagination, the awesome grandeur of flight, and the danger of battle. S-s (The Wall, 2007) never misses an opportunity to hit readers with the power of pure image, as in a two-page spread of a plane flying over a geography of faces, sure to live on in many a child's imagination. S-s' masterful and moving sense of design never fails.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)