Reviews From Our Customers
A Great Novel: Here's Why
Christopher is a fifteen-year-old, mildly autistic boy who lives with his father in Swindon, a small town about a hundred miles outside London. His mother has passed away several years ago of cancer, so it's just Christopher and his father. During the days, Christopher attends a "special needs" school, where lessons include not only the three R's, but also tips on dealing with strangers and decoding facial expressions (Christopher can recognize happy and sad faces, but more complicated faces give him trouble). For a project, Christopher's teacher tells him to write a book about himself. Adding his own individual touches along the way (a math prodigy, the boy numbers his chapters not 1, 2, 3, but as prime numbers in ascending order), and peppering the text with illustrative tables and drawings, Christopher embarks on a detective story about Mrs. Shears's dog, stabbed to death in her yard with a garden fork.
Christopher's purpose in writing his book is to emulate his hero, Sherlock Holmes (whose logical mind he greatly admires), and solve the case. But his investigations unearth more about the relationships between his family and his neighbors than about the identity of the dog's killer. Unable to decode sarcasm, jokes, or figures of speech (he calls them all "lies," since they aren't the truth), Christopher faithfully notes down his conversations and observations; though the reader, able to read between the lines, will guess the truth fairly quickly, Christopher's inability to understand social cues makes his struggle for answers all the more affecting.
Constantly bewildered by the (to him) incomprehensible behavior of those around him, Christopher resembles nothing so much as a human plunked down on a distant planet, trying desperately to figure out how to interpret the language and behavior of an alien species. And, in a way, many of Christopher's conclusions and actions make logical sense; but because he lacks a normal person's ability to make intuitive connections or understand the unspoken, Christopher has to rely on the imperfect set of rules he's learned about human behavior. Which is not to say Christopher can't also be infuriating, with his startling rigidity and resistance to change; he's prone to loss of bladder control and groaning fits when confused or scared by his surroundings - which is rather often. Nevertheless, he's deeply sympathetic and intensely believable, even if (like me) you've never met an autistic person before.
Other characters, such as Christopher's father and bereaved dog-owner Mrs. Shears, are realistically flawed and very convincing. They're not saints, by any means; Christopher's father tries hard to be patient, but can't control his frustration and anger, and all too often takes it out on his unresisting son. Mrs. Shears, for her part, is icily distant to Christopher. At first we assume that it's because of his insensitive poking into the death of her pet, but as the story progresses, we learn that her hostility stems from other, understandable (though not very noble) reasons. Obviously, Christopher's not responsible for his condition, and obviously he wouldn't have chosen to be as he is; but even though he can't help it, the boy is a heavy burden to those who must care for him, and frequent flare-ups of resentment and bitterness keep the story well away from saccharine TV-movie territory.
Haddon is a subtle and sensitive writer, leaving it to us to draw the conclusions that Christopher can't. His precise and careful prose reveal just enough to keep us a step ahead of Christopher - and give us an ominous sense of dark revelations waiting in the wings - while retaining a suspenseful mood throughout the narrative. In the end, though, the only mystery here is one that's beyond Christopher's, or anyone's, power to solve: how people can be so brutal, violent, and cruel to each other in the name of love. Along with this great novel, I'd like to recommend another Amazon quick-pick curiosity -------------------------> The Losers Club: Complete Restored Edtion by Richard Perez
get drunk and read this book
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is a novel by Mark Haddon, we all know that. The title is a quotation of a remark made by the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of Silver Blaze.
The story is written as the first-person narrative of Christopher Boone, a teenage boy living in Swindon.
Main character:
Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old boy, is the main character in the book. Christopher goes to a school for children with special needs. Though there is no explicit mention of his special need in the book, the publisher's blurb on the back cover of the book says that he has Asperger's syndrome (a condition related to autism).
Plot:
Christopher discovers the murdered body of his neighbour's dog, speared by a garden fork, and decides to investigate. He is severely limited, however, by his own fears and difficulties interpreting the world around him. Throughout all his adventures, Christopher writes a book about the happenings and his experiences, and the book he writes is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.
The story sees Christopher meet people he has never met before (even though they live on the same street as him) for the purposes of his investigation into the dog-murder. He eventually discovers that Mr Shears, who used to live opposite his home, had sex with his mother, whom he believes to be dead as his father explained to him that she died of a heart attack. He chronicles this and other discoveries in his book, and his father becomes rather angry at him when he discovers and reads the book. He hides the book and forbids Christopher to continue any investigation.
In the search for the hidden book, Christopher later discovers letters his mother sent to him that his father had hidden from him for years, and concludes that she is still alive and his father had lied to him. At this point, his father admits that he was the one who killed the dog. Christopher then starts fearing that his father may also try to kill him, and so, for the rest of the story, he embarks on a most adventurous journey to London, where his mother lives.
That's the book on a nutshell please vote "yes" this review was helpful.
Fresh & Enjoyable
Having recently finished "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" and having it still fresh in my head it is easy for me to say that this book is one of the most impressive and enjoyable works of fiction I have read in quite some time. Author Mark Haddon has written the entire book from the point of view of 15 year old autistic boy Christopher as he sets out to solve a neighborhood crime. The believability is astounding. Haddon accomplishes one of the greatest character emersions by an author in recent history. The other recommendations would have to include "Memoirs of a Geisha", "My Fractured Life", and "Life of Pi."
