The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)

A very good book. The author has managed to write a book that is both tragic and sad but hopeful and inspiring. ( )

Christopher is a 15 year old with Aspergers. He loves maths, patterns and lists but finds human emotion hard to decipher. He writes an account of the mystery of his neighbour's dog's death. Painful and funny account of the journey his investigation takes him and what he learns along the way. ( )

Christopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of this revelatory novel, relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats red-but not yellow or brown-foods and screams when he is touched. Strange as he may seem, other people are far more of a conundrum to him, for he lacks the intuitive "theory of mind" by which most of us sense what's going on in other people's heads. When his neighbor's poodle is killed and Christopher is falsely accused of the crime, he decides that he will take a page from Sherlock Holmes (one of his favorite characters) and track down the killer. As the mystery leads him to the secrets of his parents' broken marriage and then into an odyssey to find his place in the world, he must fall back on deductive logic to navigate the emotional complexities of a social world that remains a closed book to him.



I loved this book. It was smartly written, and really gave you an idea of what it would be like inside the mind of a person who is autistic. At one point Christopher says "this book will not be funny. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them". I have cared for several higher functioning kids over my nursing career, and this has been true for all of them that I know. These kids didn't get jokes. And they didn't understand sayings like "that is water under the bridge". Those kids had me thinking on how to communicate to them so they would understand and be comfortable.



The autism world is complex. There is side a spectrum that I would never begin to believe that you could lump all autistic people into a certain set of characteristics. But this book did a great job in showing what it was like for Christopher - a person with autism. And the play was fantastic. ( )

This book has received reviews ranging from love it to hate it. I don't understand the hate its. Do they believe these personality disorders don't exist? Do they feel threatened by the idea of them? I don't know. I'm one of the many who loved it.
Told from the point of view of a fifteen-year old boy with Aspergers, it gives a great insight into the way someone with this condition thinks and feels, better than any text-book explanation. It also doesn't pull any punches about the effect such a condition can have on other family members, in this case the parents, whose marriage fractures largely as a result of dealing with the boy day by day.
The book is also well written and lucid and an enjoyable read. ( )

Story of autistic boy in England and his day to day challenges in life, in school, and in his relationships with his parents. The story is narrated by Christopher, a severely autistic boy, and most of the narration reflects the condition with overly detailed descriptions, all of which are very literal. I found this to be a bit tedious, although I know people who love this book (it was selected as a PBS Best Loved Novels book) point to this as its strength. While I thought this technique was interesting, it did become tedious after a while. Christopher lives in a fairly dysfunctional family, and his life is filled with turmoil, but the story ends happily. He has reached most of his goals, including who killed a dog whose death we’re shown in the beginning of the story. ( )