The Curious Incident - Mark Haddon

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

The first time I read this book was in class in year nine and I enjoyed it immensely. It's about a young boy with behavioural problems (Most publishers say it's a type of Autism but I recently read an article about how Haddon became upset that he didn't specify autism so...) who decides to investigate the murder of the neighbours dog, only to uncover a lot of secrets kept by the supposedly trustworthy adults around him. 

Though the main character isn't exactly an expert on natural human emotion, Haddon uses this ignorance of his character to play around with the readers own emotions quite a lot. The reader ends up seeing more than the character Christopher due to their insight of emotion that Christopher lacks. Which left me crying at parts where Christopher would simply begin doing a maths puzzle in his head to distract himself from the seemingly unimportant things happening around him.

My only qualm with the book is the predictable story line. Haddon uses his writing style well to show Christopher's personality, but this seems to be the only unique thing about the book. The almost soap opera like secrecy and plot twists and turns are nothing that haven't really been done before. Leaving me believing that Haddon relied solely on his writing style, which was the product of a unique character. The plot line itself doesn't do much for me, though the characters and the emotion make up for it in that I've read it multiple times.

In all honestly I cried a lot at this book. And I would recommend reading it if you don't get too emotionally attached to books and characters, as whilst reading it I found that I wasn't the happiest of people. 

On an entirely different note my friend has Eragon. My brother has Eldest. I'm about to start Inheritance. And there's a sad empty space around my copy of Brisingr. Not to mention I spent forever looking up plot summary's for the first three books because it's been so so so long since I've read any of them, only to open the book and find a small prologue of the events from the previous books! It might be a long while since I post again, as Inheritance is quite long and I do have exams next month.

Elias xx