The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark HaddonPublished: May 18th 2004 by Vintage
Pages: 226
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out a terrifying journey will turn his whole upside down.
Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.
I can't believe I thought how bad this book would be when I got to hear we were going to read it for required reading in English class. I never heard a positive thing about it, so I had such low hopes for this when I started reading. Yet, as I got further and further into it, I started wondering if this was the same book my friends told me about. This wasn't bad at all.
In fact, so beautiful! So well done, and so realistic. The way Mark Haddon described events from Christopher's point of view... I truly believed it. Autism is not a subject I get to read about, being a student of human sciences. In fact, this was a first for me. How interesting it was, I don't think I'll keep reading in that genre.
May I take a paragraph to talk about the plot twist, around page one hundred and fifty? My heart broke into thousands of little pieces. Whilst Christopher was still busy with figuring things out, the minute I read the first letter, I knew. I loved how the family drama part got to play something. It made me appreciate how hard it must be for Christopher's environment to get along with him.
Getting closer to the ending, things started getting complicated for me. Mark Haddon seemed to pay way more attention to unimportant issues, leaving me with other things happening in a jiffy. Maybe that's how Christopher saw it. Still, it was quite a drawback. Also the Math and other clever things did not feel very interesting to me.
Conclusion? I liked it very much, I really did. It's just sad it went a bit downhill towards the end.
