The well-known questions such as What, How and, above all, Why are given some unexpected and enchanted answers in the volume III of the book A Little Frog’s Heart. These answers are delivered by the original characters we got used to celebrating along the story. The relationship between a grandfather and his grandson is being brought in a warm light destined to open up our hearts for the harmonies of this volume, The Stellar Waltz of Life. In the glittering bunch of the stories which interweave and overflow from each one to the others, as a modern version of the series On Thousand and One Nights, one could discern two mythological episodes, somehow a remnant of a popular Christianity magnificently adapted for a contemporaneous audience, of a genuine originality, which sheds their light as if they were some big rounded regal grapes, even if they are in a way ‘removed’ from the bunch and ‘spread’ all over the volume.

The Coming of Age, the fourth volume of the series A Little Frog’s Heart is a hymn to Universal Grandparents, to their wisdom and eternal love for their grandchildren, a work of art which will find its admirers and readers among those who accept it as part of their lives. This picture is a perfect one but as we have already got used to author George Vîrtosu, the reader might well be baffled by the information he has never known his grandparents! Though a tragic one, this reality offered him the most cherished Gift: from all the elders of the village he chose the wisest, the most industrious and enchanting ones. He just took the best from each of them using his own imagination and so he created the perfect grandparents. When will you know that you have reached your coming of age? A bet on this topic between two fleas is rapidly transformed into a tragedy for their family, a true „baptism of coming of age” for the main character of the story. You have the opportunity to learn how they are going to sort out this conflict and what are the truths of this marathon of surprising adventures reading the forth volume of the series A Little Frog’s Heart.

To read a book, to go page after page through a comic, even to watch a film, very much resembles the adventure of travelling down a road. When the book has several volumes, when a multitude of secondary stories cross with the main story, the road seems to be full of adventures; because you have a long way to go, surrounded by miraculous landscapes, you have many surprising detours to make, you have to walk over bridges and viaducts. This is the situation with the present cycle, that of the “Little Frog’s Heart“, about which I am more and more convinced that it is written “for all the ages“, that is, not only for my grandchildren, but even for grandparents like myself. In this volume, the Drop of Blood we met in the first book seems to be tired and would like to get some rest. The Flea and the little Silk Worm, for a change, seem to be not just well rested, but also so curious and talkative that they do not fall silent even once over the course of three hundred pages or so. The Flea, who is older and more experienced, tells the little Worm a multitude of miraculous stories, only asking the Worm not interrupt him! As if that’s what’s going to happen! As if you can make such a minuscule, yet so lively a creature ask not just hundreds, but thousands of questions! Just like any other child, the little Worm is full of “whys“, and the Flea, despite his feigned discontent, strives to answer them all. And so we find, together with the little Worm, a multitude of things about dreams and their interpretation, about the wisdom of fleas, about what happened to the horned cattle, or about the power of memories. But, above all, the memorable story may be the more lengthy story, which crosses some of those already mentioned, about the burial of the Old Rat, former master of the Flea and his family. As in other parts of this cycle, what is completely impressive here is the way in which the mythological elements, some connected to primitive, folkloric Christianity, some connected to paganism, are introduced in this somehow “realist“ story, even if it is written in the key of the fantastic and the miraculous. For the reader, irrespective of age as I realise now, reading these volumes is surely a pleasure. For the young reader, for the very young, for those who do not read yet but are read to, this is also a sort of “book of teachings“ through which readers can explain to themselves even those things which go above the first layer of understanding. On the other hand, they can make contact with the ethical dimension of our experience in this world. Congratulations to the author, and I wish good progress to the readers of all ages; as for me, I am waiting. Waiting for the next volumes, I mean. – Liviu Antonesei, 9 June 2011, Iași