Review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

It's been a while since I updated my reading list, and I've actually read three books including the one listed right now, but they weren't exactly prize picks, and not anything I'd recommend. Plus one was from the seventies and had a lot of Zero-G sex, which was a little awkward to read about.

But, this one, 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time' by Mark Haddon was great!

It starts off with Christopher, a young autistic boy who discovers his neighbors dog speared to the ground with a pitchfork. The dog's owner calls the police on Christopher, and when they arrive and attempt to arrest him he hits the officers.

This results in charges of assaulting an officer. Christopher decides to investigate the murder of the dog, and things quickly spiral out of control as he discovers clues and asks questions.

That's the basic summary. It's written from a first person view, so while you're reading you discover clues and live through the triumphs and tribulations of a high functioning autistic boy. It's really fascinating, and would be a good read for anyone interested in psychology and the function of a human brain.

It's also very quirky. All the chapters are numbered in primes, (1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on), and here and there smattered throughout will be simplistic drawings. Christoper has a hard time filtering out background information, so he'll look at everything at once and describe the feeling of information overload he gets. This leads to parts of the book in which Christopher often goes off on tangents completely unrelated to the current situation about subjects like Malaysia or Faerie Hoaxes.

Not only that, but it's written very simplistically, literally like a young boy might write. Every detail of this adds to realism of the book, making it really seem like a novel that an autistic boy would write. He even includes the arguments he holds with his Teaching Assistant, Sioban, about the content of his book.

All in all The Curious Incident was a book which was easy to lose myself in, it's not a hard read, but still intellectually enjoyable. There's absolutely nothing I can say negative about it from a writing standpoint.
As per usual I find that the biggest problem I had with the book was the end. With most books I find they're either too short, or too drawn out, or don't summarize in a satisfactory way. This book also has that problem, I feel like it wrapped up too quickly, but I do give it big points for having what I would call a 'satisfactory' ending. Without giving it away, it was one that wasn't happy, but far from sad.

I'm not sure what my problem is with books that have happy endings. I'm a pretty optimistic guy. Anyway...

Overall, I give The Curious Incident

9/10

It loses one point for having a poor summary. It was still a good ending, but it could have been more. Otherwise, it was a fun, laugh out loud, clever, witty, and all-around enjoyable read.

I will recommend this book to anyone who likes books about people with disabilities. I haven't read much about autism, and I've never even heard of a book that puts you in the shoes of an autistic youth, so this was really a wild ride from start to finish.