Will I love The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time?

I got this novel for my wife, but once I read her the beginning, she had to wait until I finished it before she could read it. It’s one of those books. It won a lot of awards when it was published and it became a Broadway play, and I can see why. Christopher Boone is on the spectrum, a teenager who doesn’t understand lies, emotions, and dislikes being touched. He does understand numbers, including prime numbers into the thousands, and knows all the countries and their capitals. He lives with his father, and when a neighbor’s dog is murdered,… show more.

What I love about this book is that Christopher is such an unusual child and sees the world in ways that most of us do not.

In reading this bizarre and disturbing mystery story, we begin to see the world differently ourselves. I like, too, the fact that what is different about him is never named – it’s not some specific diagnosis or categorization – he is just Christopher, the odd, mathematically gifted, strangely reacting, teenager.

When he becomes terrified of what we might take as quite ordinary events and places, I begin to feel some of his difference –… show more.

Beautifully written book from the perspective of an autistic boy. Funny, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

This book is well known and was published way back in 2003… I reread it this summer. I rarely, if ever, reread a book because there are so many options out there. However, the title caught my eye in a bookcase in my office and I could not resist. This is a first person narrative and the narrator, Christopher John Francis Boone, is autistic. He sets out to solve the mystery of a dead dog lying in the grass in the middle of the neighbors front lawn with a pitchfork pinning it to the ground. His search takes him into… show more.

As a counselor, I worked with kids on the spectrum, and I grew to love them. This is a mystery novel told in first person by Christopher, who is on the spectrum. I found him to be such an engaging character and his narration unfolds in ways that are surprising, revealing, touching, and Christopher’s life on the spectrum provides inadvertent revelations as he pursues the mystery of the dead dog in the front yard.

It’s Christopher’s character, his persistence, the way he continues to engage people in a world that sometimes confounds him, and a character that seems completely real… show more.

This stunning book puts me in the head of a young boy with a neurodivergent way of seeing the world. I picked up this book before a cross-country flight and couldn’t stand that we landed, and I would have to stop reading for the drive home.

It immersed me in Christopher’s dilemma of trying to make sense of people. The most trivial things become massive. I was hurtled along with him for a harrowing, incredible journey. Profoundly moving!

I read this book before my daughter was diagnosed with autism, but I recognized things in the main character, Christopher, that reminded me of my daughter, Nina. His honesty and intelligence, plus his ability to infuriate his parents, certainly rang bells.

Christopher is very lovable, and I find the scenes heartbreaking when the public misunderstands his overtures of friendship–or just his honest curiosity. This rings true, though, because the public can be very judgmental of autistic people if they are viewed as being too ‘different.’ Thankfully, the book has a positive ending; in fact, the final phrase is ‘…I can… show more.

This is arguably the book that brought a modern understanding of autism into the mainstream consciousness. It’s about an autistic young man (although never labelled as such) who is perturbed by a distressing event, and the unfolding of circumstances leading up to it.

There is an oft-quoted statement: ‘If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.’ True, for sure, not every person with autism is a maths genius or bothered about certain noises, but the author does not claim this is a book about autism, nor does the author claim to have lived experience of… show more.

I love story remixes: new takes on an existing genre. This book takes a conventional mystery plotline and gives it bright new coloring thanks to the narrator’s autism.

As is often the case with neurodivergent folks, Christopher doesn’t know much about the world, but he understands himself. A quiet masterpiece. No sentimentality, thank heavens.

This is one of the best novels about autism I’ve read, even though the author and publisher insist the main character’s condition is not necessarily autism.

The author, Mark Haddon, wisely chooses to show us the world exclusively through the eyes of a teenage British boy named Christopher who is afflicted with the dark gift. Because autistic brains are always trying to figure things out, always scrutinizing and analyzing the world in our own idiosyncratic way, Haddon turns the boy’s encounter with a dead dog into a detective story.

One night, Christopher finds a neighbor’s dog dead in the yard… show more.