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

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Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Author: Mark Haddon
Published by: Vintage
Release Date: May 18, 2004
Format: ebook
Pages: 240
Genres: Fiction
Source: Overdrive
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2021 Backlist Reader Challenge, Lenoreo's 2021 COYER Spring, Lenoreo's 2021 Diversity Reading Challenge
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My rating:

Blurb:

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.

My Review:

4.5 stars — I predict that this is going to be a very hard review to write.

That start killed me.  I wasn’t expecting it, and as an animal lover I was crushed.  But I think in some ways it helped me get into Christopher’s head right away, and what a fantastic and unique place to be.  I don’t know that I could even describe it, but it just brought so many different perspectives even though we were only seeing through Christopher’s eyes.  I realize he is but one individual on the spectrum, and that everyone is different so he is not representative necessarily, but I really appreciated at least having that one perspective if that makes sense.  It really made me think about a) how hard it must be to live in a world with all these arbitrary rules, and where society does NOT understand people who fall outside those rules; and b) how incredibly hard it must be to be a parent to someone on the spectrum, and how we, as a society, really need to step up to provide support and understanding.

Things I loved that surprised me: how the way in which Christopher sees the world really opened my eyes to how odd human beings can be, and how we all have our own idiosyncracies (just perhaps not to Christopher’s extremes).  His way of viewing certain situations either made me laugh or were just profound in their own way.

I even appreciated the very FLAWED parents he had.  I mean, I still feel very conflicted at the end of the story, but I think the story was more interesting having parents that weren’t “wonder parents”, but just normal people learning (and often failing) along the way.  Because that’s probably the norm.

I think I expected more on the mystery front, but that was just sort of the impetus of Christopher’s journey.  And his journey was the real story.

So yeah.  I have a feeling I’m going to be thinking about this story for some time to come.  I think my hubby needs to reread it (hint hint) since he was the one that goaded me into reading it.  And he was right.  I really did enjoy it, even if it was a bit more emotionally taxing/anxiety inducing than I was expecting.