Tuesday, October 23, 2012

TY Book Recommendation 5

Ally Boyd Crotty has been reading Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time for her Transition Year Extended Essay, and recommends it:

This book is about a boy named Christopher Boone, and Christopher has autism. The story begins when Christopher finds a dog dead on his neighbour's lawn. This dog is his neighbour's dog, called Wellington, whom he knows and likes. Because Christopher wants to find out who killed Wellington, he decides to write a 'murder mystery' novel. As the novel unfolds it unravels to be about more than just who killed Wellington, but also about Christopher's complicated family life and the secrets and lies held by his parents.

I would recommend this book to anyone my age and older, but probably not younger. I especially like how it is written through the eyes of an autistic boy of about my age because you can see how differently he sees day-to-day things to us, and this is very interesting, and also amusing at times. Christopher's narrative is one of my favourite things about this book, although it is quite hard to get into at the beginning. Once you get past the beginning chapters however, it lures you in, and after that I did not want to put the book down.

Christopher puts some maths problems in the book which are something like puzzles, such as the 'Monty Hall Problem'. This is one of the main reasons this book is more suited for my age group or older because I know that if I was any younger I could maybe find these a little confusing, or even just very boring, but when I read it I really liked having the problems because it did make the book even more unique.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it would definitely recommend it to a friend.

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