The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time | Review

3.01/5.00

Published: 2003

Genre: Mystery

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“I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical, but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

A British teenager investigates a murder mystery soon eclipsed by family drama. The mystery was rather easy to solve, and the twist about halfway in didn’t surprise me much. Like Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, though, the mystery isn’t exactly the important part of the story.

It picks up at about the halfway point. For about a two-hundred-page book, that isn’t exactly a bad thing, but I was starting to get bored by then.

I understand why I’m supposed to love this book and laud it as a gold star for representation. It’s sweet, sad, and boring. To me, Christopher is no different from the other special needs kids that make infrequent appearances in books and shows. Sure, it is representation and important diversity, but it makes him more of a stock example than an actual character. With the way he’s portrayed in the book and the way other characters respond to him, even the ones who have never met him, I kept forgetting he was fifteen. He seemed closer to ten or twelve. His musings of life did not strike me as deep or profound but instead reminded me of those clichéd Tumblr posts.

Maybe I’m missing something. The story just doesn’t stand out to me. It strikes me as just another story I have seen time and time again. Yes, seeing it from the perspective of Christopher is an interesting touch, but in modern entertainment that alone is not enough to make it incredible. The problem is that I’ve seen it before. Not many times but enough to make this book less unique. This book relies on that unique quality and a few creative (and some recycled) quirks.

If you haven’t read a lot of books, are looking for a unique narrator and a quick read, I would recommend this book. It’s good. It just doesn’t stand out as phenomenal or particularly special.

Mark Haddon is best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but he has also written other works. He has won the Whitbread Award, British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year, and Costa Novel Award. 

“If you enjoy math and you write novels, it’s very rare that you’ll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.” –Mark Haddon