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 enlarge | Author: Mark Haddon
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £0.01
You Save: £7.98 (100%)
New (41) Used (165) Collectible (6) from £0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  442 reviews
Sales Rank: 515
Media: Paperback
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0099450259
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780099450252
ASIN: 0099450259
Publication Date: April 1, 2004
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: We aim to post all orders within 2 working days. All orders are fully guaranteed and sent from a UK located business. Email support for all customers.
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| Customer Reviews:
 A few weeks in the life of Christopher Boone September 25, 2008
This can be quite a hard book to read, documenting several weeks of the life of Aspergers sufferer Christopher Boone. Caught up in the aftermath of his parent's bitter marriage break-up, Christopher goes against his father's wishes to investigate the violent death of a near neighbour's dog. However, his emulation of his fictional hero, Sherlock Holmes, leads him to discover things about his parents that he certainly had not bargained for and the ramifications for his broken family are huge.
Narrated by Christopher himself, the book starts of in a fairly light-hearted way and some of his habits and thoughts such as his irrational dislike of the colour yellow and France are actually quite funny. However, when his normally very patient father is driven to breaking point by Christopher's actions and strikes him, the whole tone is changed and it becomes a painful, but poignant read.
Whilst it would be difficult to truly get in the head of an AS sufferer, Haddon does a good job (in my opinion, writing as someone with an autistic nephew) and makes this book work to a point. It could be accused of being (Rain Man) clichéd with Christopher's infinite powers of observation and almost genius level of maths, but he does not dilute the downside to his condition either. Frequent violent and noisy outbursts are on show, as well as Christopher's penchant for hiding in small, quiet spaces. What started of as charming and eccentric mannerisms soon become irritating and you sympathise greatly with Christopher and more so with his parents. A lot of Christoper's musings on science and maths seem to be "copy and paste" padding though, that add little to the rather Spartan story as a whole.
Overall, I can't highly recommend this book. Someone with a special needs child or who works in that area could gain from this in a "thank God it's not only me" kind of way but personally, I found this a just about ok read.
 Charming, different and easy to read September 23, 2008
I love this book. It is different from anything else I've read. Easy to read, engaging and charming. An almost perfect book.
Even if you don't normally like reading books it is worth giving this a go.
"A Spot Of Bother" was a bit of a disappointment after this.
Fantastic Read September 22, 2008
I saw this book one day at the local libary i didnt have a clue what it was about or anything like that before i started to read it. I solely picked up this book because it had an intresting cover. Never-the-less as soon as i started reading it i was absolutly hooked. this was a fantastic book with such a different complex but yet simple way of writing.
Truly an original way to tell a story.
Really good read September 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Amazon synopsis:
The title The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (or the curious incident of the dog in the night-time as it appears within the book) is an appropriate one for Mark Haddon's ingenious novel both because of its reference to that most obsessive and fact-obsessed of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, and because its lower-case letters indicate something important about its narrator.
Christopher is an intelligent youth who lives in the functional hinterland of autism--every day is an investigation for him because of all the aspects of human life that he does not quite get. When the dog next door is killed with a garden fork, Christopher becomes quietly persistent in his desire to find out what has happened and tugs away at the world around him until a lot of secrets unravel messily.
Haddon makes an intelligent stab at how it feels to, for example, not know how to read the faces of the people around you, to be perpetually spooked by certain colours and certain levels of noise, to hate being touched to the point of violent reaction. Life is difficult for the difficult and prickly Christopher in ways that he only partly understands; this avoids most of the obvious pitfalls of novels about disability because it demands that we respect--perhaps admire--him rather than pity him. --Roz Kaveney
What an incredible book! Haddon has done himself proud. This is a very good representation of a boy how suffers with autism. I think it is great that this has been written, showing how life is for people with this kind of disability. Everything has to be ordered and logical for Christopher to feelcomfortable and if it isn't, he screams and hides and tries to block out noise. I have contact with people with autism and this is very true and I think it is great that this has been brought to our attention so we can understand a little bit of how life is for other people.
My favourite character was Christopher. He took risks, he was humorous when he did not mean to be and he was honest, and I just loved him. Haddon wrote his character very well.
The book was easy and quick to read. It was gripping as there was always a new adventure and it made me laugh in several places. My only complaints are there was a lot of bad language used and lots of maths problems which I didn't understand - but the latter was part of what made Christopher's character so unique and realistic.
This is a really good book. Go read it!!
9/10
 Absolute rubbish. August 31, 2008
2 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book is bloody awful. The entire central premise is patronising gibberish. If this book was written by an aspergic person about his life it would excuse the bad writing. If it was an intelligent, well written explanation of an aspergic child's life then it would be alright but it's not. This book is poorly written gibberish with the pretense of being written by an Aspie to cover up its bad writing. This is so patronising it's unbelievable. If this was done of any other social group there would be howls of protest and quite right to. It's no more subtle than a white person putting on blackface for a good 'ole minstrel show.
The worst thing is that this isn't even a particularly accurate portrayal of an aspergic person. It's a ridiculous caricature with a generic group of various "asperigc" traits thrown together all in one, reinforcing the same old stereotypes (Rain Man) about this cross between an asperic/autistic savant, as though most aspergic people were savants. The plot itself is so thin that it does nothing to make up for the pretentious but yet awful writing. Oh yeah, also it gets resolved half way through and after that the book has no point.
The sheer volume of ridiculous asides are an annoyance and they also compltely fail. If the author really wanted to present Christopher as some kind of mathematical genius he may have bothered doing more than the most basic math. Prime Numbers? Who cares. Calculating prime numbers is trivial for anyone who can manage times tables. We're to take this as proof that this kid is a mathematical genius? And in the second half it gets even more bizarre with large parts of this already thin book taken up by random rants against religion. This becomes even more ridiculous when you learn that these are in fact the authors own views. Wow, using your "exploration of life from the perspective of an autism sufferer" to parrot your tedious philosophy, how incredibly subtle. So we're meant to believe that Christopher is incredibly intelligent and obssessed with math and logic and this inevitably leads him to the necessity of science and atheism to go along with them and this also happens to be the author's view, what a subtle point. This is not to mention the repeated and pointless profanity in this apparent children's book. Please. Do not buy this book. Just save your money. Buy something good, like candy, instead.
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