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Avg. Customer Review: 
The Perfect Book to Understand the Mind of an Autistic Child
The Curios Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon, is a brilliantly written novel about a fifteen-year-old autistic boy named Christopher John Francis Boone, "who knows all the countries of the world and their capitals, and every prime number up to 7,057." Christopher lives in England with his father and pet rat Toby; sadly Christopher's mother died two years ago in the hospital due to an unexpected fatal heart attack. Christopher begins his story with a mysterious midnight murder of his neighbor's dog, named Wellington. But as Christopher begins his "detective work" of figuring out who murdered Wellington and their motive, hidden secrets and masked troubles about his family and of his past begin to unravel, all by accident and by a twist of fate. Prior to reading this book, I had limited knowledge on how autistic people thought and coped day-to-day in this world, but I truly think that this book helped me to compensate for that lack of knowledge with amazingly acute details of what supposedly goes on inside the head of a child with autism. I believe what sets this book apart from others, besides the amount of knowledge and understanding about autism that is obtained from reading this book, is how the information in it is presented. I strongly believe that this book would give someone an insight and help them learn about how autistic people behave and think, without struggling through the medical jargon in a medical or doctoral report about autism. I feel this way because this book is written through an autistic child's perspective; reading this book is just like looking through the kid's eyes and feeling and experiencing everything that he is. I think that that is much more valuable than a medical report stating the "progress" or "well-being" of someone with autism, and what made this book even better was that it was so enjoyable and fun to read that I had a hard time tearing myself from it! Overall, I totally enjoyed learning how people with autism get through each day and the differences and similarities they have with people who are not autistic. There was nothing I did not enjoy about this book; I thought it was fascinating all around. I would recommend this book to anyone because I think it would be extremely beneficial if more people were aware of how autism affects the people who have it and those people around them.
 Excellent Debut Novel
_The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time_, is only tangentially a mystery, but primarily the story of an autistic boy, Christopher Boone, told from his own first-person perspective (which does make the book a challenge to read at times). Christopher lives in Swindon, England, with his father and has a rather complex set of rules by which he lives his life (i.e., if he sees 4 red cars in a row, this means it will be a Good Day, while 4 yellow cars in a row makes it a Black Day). When he discovers a neighbor's dog killed by a garden fork one night, Christopher is a suspect at first, but then he sets out to discover the true culprit, modeling his search after the techniques of Sherlock Holmes. He does ultimately solve the mystery, which grows to encompass what happened to his mother, who his father has told him died of a heart attack in the hospital. What a great book this was, at turns funny and very sad, sometimes at the same time. Christopher is an amazingly well-realized character, logical to a fault (the chapters are numbered with prime numbers), yet entirely unable to fathom the most basic emotions in others. He takes and passes A-level maths and dreams of attending university and becoming a scientist, yet his failure at the most basic of human interactions makes one see how impossible this dream really is. It's not that often that a book really hits me, but this one left me with a lump in my throat when I was finished. An amazing first novel.
Christopher's world
I do not know a thing about autism--so maybe this has something to do with why I was drawn into Christopher's tale. I found this character to be very interesting as he explained to me, the reader, how his mind works and why it works the way it does. I credit the author, Mark Haddon, for sticking to the challange of conveying such a story. There's much skill in the craftmanship and I find it to be a very intelligent read. I don't understand how another person here said they read--which caught my eye because I did as well--'Simon Lazarus' and found that to be more "worthy" and that 'A Curious incident..'is "drivel" or gimmicky. I see nothing of the sort here. Both of these works are distinct in their own right, and both are smart and quite readable. So for this reader: 'Simon Lazarus' and Christopher's story here are both entertaining and fascinating reads in their own distinct way. That's what literature is all about. Appreciate them both.
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