The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.

This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years."
~~back cover

This is a very curious book. From Wikipedia:
"The story is written in the first-person perspective of Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old boy who describes himself as 'a mathematician with some behavioral difficulties' living in Swindon, Wiltshire. Although Christopher's condition is not stated explicitly within the novel, indeed, the words "autism" or "Asperger's" are not used by Christopher at all, the book cover summary (inside or back cover, depending on the edition) refers to Asperger syndrome, high-functioning autism, or savant syndrome. In July 2009, Haddon stated on his blog that "curious incident is not a book about asperger’s....if anything it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. the book is not specifically about any specific disorder" and that he is not an expert on autism spectrum disorder or Asperger's."

But it seemed very clear to me that Christopher was autistic -- somewhere on the autism spectrum. It's an amazing book, looked at from that perspective. As usual when the book is narrated from the first person POV, Christopher's thought processes and decisions don't seem so out of the ordinary. We all have our likes and dislikes, quirks, phobias. Christopher just has more of them than most of us, and they proscribe his world.

What I didn't like about the book was the situation between his parents and the neighbors -- an unsavory situation at best, although maybe a relatively common way of dealing with the emotions inherent in the developments (trying to avoid spoilers here.)

A lot of people LOVED this book, including my "adopted" niece. Which is why I got enticed into reading it in the first place.