If the way the boy quietly cares for the odd, teapot-like creature in The Lost Thing resonated with you—especially how his small kindness cuts through a gray, indifferent city—you’ll feel the same tug in The Heart and the Bottle. Jeffers follows a girl who literally puts her heart in a bottle after a loss, only to learn how to open herself again. Like that visit to the “Federal Department of Odds and Ends,” it’s a simple, striking metaphor for what the world does to wonder—and how we choose to protect or release it.

The boy in The Lost Thing finds a strange creature while collecting bottle tops and quietly shepherds it toward a home that fits. In Skellig, Michael discovers a frail, dusty figure in his garage—part man, part bird—who survives on takeout and dead flies. With his friend Mina, Michael nurses Skellig back to strength so he can reveal what he truly is and where he should be. The same tender, unshowy caretaking—and the ache of guiding a found marvel to its right door—beats at the heart of this story.

If you loved how The Lost Thing lets a baffling creature simply exist—no rulebook, just a boy who notices—then Tuesday will delight you. One Tuesday night, frogs lift off on their lily pads and drift over sleeping suburbs, spooking a dog and gliding past living-room windows. By morning, the town is puzzled; by week’s end, something else begins to fly. With almost no words, Wiesner captures that same wry amazement at the extraordinary slipping into the everyday.

The final image in The Lost Thing—finding a hidden place where the creature belongs—lands like a breath of hope after loneliness. The Red Tree follows a girl through a day of overwhelming fears and blank, gray noise, while a tiny red leaf appears and disappears until it blossoms into an unexpected tree in her room. Tan’s imagery channels the same intimate ache and the same quiet, luminous release.

Like the boy who sees what the adults of The Lost Thing can’t—shrugging off forms and departments to do what’s right—the aviator in The Little Prince relearns how to see. The prince’s stories of baobabs, a vain rose, and a businessman who counts stars echo the gray bureaucracy and billboard-cluttered cityscape you remember. And when the fox asks to be tamed, it strikes the same chord as guiding the lost thing through that hidden door: care gives meaning to the world.