Grennan opens the book with himself in a dangerous scene, hopelessly lost on a mountainside somewhere in Nepal. It’s nighttime and he and his two porters are out of food, water, and shelter. When searching for any remaining food in his backpack, he touches the folder containing the written biographies and printed photos of the lost Nepalese children whose families he is trying to find. Despite his larger goal of reuniting families, in this moment of danger “[w]hat did matter was figuring out how we would get through the night” (2).

Little Princes revolves around Nepal’s civil war, which the author briefly describes in this first section. Between 1996 and 2006, Maoist rebels led a nation-wide insurgency against the monarchy that ruled Nepal. During the decade-long war between the Maoists and the Royal Nepalese Army, 13,000 Nepalese were killed. Some of the major victims in this war were Nepal’s children, a great number of whom were taken from their families in remote villages and conscripted into the rebel army. To protect them, impoverished families gave their children over to individuals who promised to keep them safe from the Maoist rebels but who instead were child traffickers who forced the children into dangerous and sometimes deadly situations.