The curious incident of the dog in the night-time

With a title cleverly taken from the Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles, this novel is one with a character with a personality parallel to Sherlock Holmes. Christopher John Francis Boone, the main character of the novel, can tell you all of the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. Christopher is very logical and extremely good at maths, all of which may be a result of his autism. He could not tell you what these meant:

and if you talked to him in metaphors, he wouldn't understand you, but if you talked to him about numbers, he could help you instantly.

In this book, Christopher encounters a mystery. His neighbour, Mrs. Shears, had a large black poodle named Wellington. One night, Christopher is out in the garden when he sees Wellington dead. He decides, after a long night filled with yelling, fighting, and jail, that he is going to solve the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? To do this, he emulates his favourite character, Sherlock Holmes, a creation from the mind of one Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Although he dislikes the author, he idolizes Sherlock, because Sherlock is so like him. He states

"I also like The Hound of the Baskervilles because I like Sherlock Holmes and I think that if I were a proper detective he is the kind of detective I would be. He is very intelligent and he solves the mysteries and he says
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
But he notices them, like I do. (73)

However, this book is not only about solving the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? It is also a story about finding his mother, who, even after she "died" was writing him letters. He decides to live with her after finding out a shocking truth about his father and embarks on a long, tough journey from Swindon to London on his own, along the way escaping police, almost getting hit by trains and arguing with a rude man over something as simple as an A to Zed.

This book has captivated myself and many of my fellow classmates. To me, it was interesting not because of its portrayal of an autistic kid, but because of the way the author shows us the world. The fact that Christopher is autistic is merely another tool that Mark Haddon uses to build a wonderful story filled with mundane tasks that flow together in a way that compels us to read the novel and empathize with a character who doesn't know what empathy is himself.