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Garro's Book Review    

the curious incident

of the dog

in the night-time

by Mark Haddon

Fiction
First published in 2003

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"Five red cars mean that it is going to be a Super Good Day"

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Christopher John Francis Boone is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he discovers a dead dog on a neighbour's lawn he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the mystery gets - for both Christopher and the rest of his family.

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I read this book last year.  This is Mark Haddon's debut novel which was written in the first-person narrative of Christopher John Francis Boone.  I still remember I had once wrote a composition talking about a man who deeply believed he was sick but indeed he was just paranoid.  I wrote this story by using first-person narration and I had got an 'A' and my English teacher said if I continuously wrote this way, I could really do something about it!  Well... apparently I can't!

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This is both an interesting and touching story. 

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Interesting .... Christopher is mathematically gifted and socially hopeless, raised in a working-class home by parents who can barely cope with their child's quirks. He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his elders and peers.  He quoted a number of famous puzzles of maths and logic.  Besides, he numbered his chapters strictly with prime numbers, ignoring composite numbers such as 4 and 6. So the first is Chapter 2, followed by 3, then 5, 7, 11, and so on.

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Touching .... Christopher's father loves him very much.  I don't want to reveal too much about the story but what sores me is that Christopher cannot comprehend human emotion and he has still not completely forgiven and trusted his father at the end of the story.  I love dogs, have 2 myself, though, I have forgiven Ed Boone and felt for him that he couldn't win back his son's trust.

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This is a must-read, unlike Forrest Gump, Christopher Boone is a real autistic kid.  I read some reviews about this book and came across one which was written by a real autistic (or so he claimed) who said "Mark Haddon absolutely 'got it right' in this book".

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Read an extract here..

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