The title is actually a quotation lifted from the "Silver Blaze" story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.* The protagonist, Christopher Boone, is a 15-year-old boy on the autism spectrum who discovers his next-door neighbor's dog murdered in her yard. He decides to play detective and solve the murder. Throughout the story, Christopher uncovers a few more mysteries surrounding his parents and his father's true relationship with his neighbor.
The Good
This book resonated strongly with me, as you'll below in my super-emotional life story. (Sorry in advance.) I usually avoid this type of "literary" fiction because I get really cynical about making emotional connections with the characters. But, I genuinely connected with Christopher, and I could see a high-YA audience connecting to it too. A cynical reviewer on Goodreads said that it's the gimmicky type of book that's written to go begging for awards, but I think the awards are deserved. It's creative. More importantly, the topic is treated respectfully.
What I most appreciated about this book is its compassionate depiction of Christopher's parents (from his POV, at least) as a pair of low-income, less-educated people struggling to understand how to help their son. Low-income families really struggle with the financial burdens of disability. I can't say how it is in the UK with socialized healthcare, but I know here in the US, insurance companies are obviously quite evil about covering preexisting conditions. And if you don't have federal insurance... well, you're fucked.If you don't have the luxury of a Special Education program at your public school, or the finances to have specialists treat your child to testing and tutoring, what can you do?
* And you thought I was getting tired of this Sherlock shit. How wrong you are.
Feminism/Life Points for "Curious Incident":
+1 for building understanding around autistic youths
+1 for depicting the financial burden of disability
+1 for compassionately depicting the emotional difficulties of a family with a differently-abled child
A lot of people will fight the first point out, though. For some reason, the publishers starting claiming that Christopher's character has Asperger's Syndrome and that was put on the cover, to Mark Haddon's chagrin. This is a publishing problem, not an authorial problem.
My Main Contention: I really wanted to take away all points for a dog dying, because that's just not cool, you guys. I really can't deal with animals dying.
Personal Connection
I was fascinated by this book because as a teacher, I am working directly in child psychological development. I work with an autistic kindergartner, and I saw her echoed in Christopher. I'm glad I read this book, because it gave me some idea on how to approach this student, and any other differently-developed student. As a school practitioner, I still have a lot to learn about differentiating my lessons to meet those students' needs. My mother is a former Special Ed teacher (SPED, we teachers now call it), and my brother is a high-functioning ADD/OCD person, so I grew up fairly tolerant of what people call " mental disorders." (And what is an "ordered mind" these days?) I spend a lot of time picking our fantastic SPED team's brains, because SPED practice today is really beginning to shine.
I also felt a strong connection to this book because of how Christopher is treated as a savant. He's incredibly intelligent, and I love how the book showed that he could still function and perform well despite his mental handicaps. That same Kindergartner I work with struggles with social interaction, but her comprehension and other things aren't at all hindered by her autism. I want to punch people who would think her less-intelligent or stupid because of it.
Intelligence is such a fascinating topic to me. What kind of environment produces academic intelligence? I often consider how I've developed my own abilities, and why. I learned to read very quickly as a kid, with great comprehension and recall. I'm a good speller, and a knack for grammar, because I must have the innate "linguistic" type of brain. Not everyone can hear cadence and voice in their own writing, and I can. Why? I don't know.
On the other hand, I have certain compulsions - are they a product of intelligence, like Rain Man? I am so compulsively organized with objects that when things are cluttered or disordered, I literally feel a cloud descending upon my mind. And to clear the cloud, I must clean shit up. I get extremely angry when people try to disorient, tease, or confuse me. When I lose things, I feel like I'm dying until I find them. I would weep horribly if I lost things as a kid, and I tried really hard to suppress this feeling by being organized.Whether this indicates me to have OCDish tendencies or not remains to be seen, I guess. ("No, I'm not OCD. I'm just Librarian." Haha.) I guess that mental stimulation is an addiction to me.
I also have a horrible fear of my mind deteriorating. Because I don't know about my genetics, this fear looms in the back of my mind. The idea of dementia in my old age terrifies me, because I value my mind above all else. I also suffer from depression, which I feel destroys my thinking abilities sometimes. I brushed my own emotional/mental borders before, when I was a teenager, and I used to have a serious issue with self-harm. I completely connected with what Christopher called his "Black Days" - except for me, it wasn't just days. It was months of fog and anger and buttloads of irrationality. I can't rightly parallel myself to Christopher or any other autistic person, but I can certainly understand how difficult it is to control one's moods based on the chemical whims of the brain.
I realized this fear last year, when my Aunt had an aneurysm. When she was operated upon to try to help the aneurysm, it popped and she was briefly in a coma. Now, she's lost control of one whole side of her body, and much of her mind. This Aunt was a SPED teacher as well, and one of the sharpest and most logical women I've ever known, so I see a tragic irony in the situation. It's haunting, and I feel such grief for her and my cousins. Now I think, what will happen to me in the future? What if one day I get in a car accident, and I lose control of my body forever? What if I became another Phineas Gage?
Nature Vs. Nurture?
I don't know if my skills are a sign of something unique, like an eidetic memory or me being a 3-year-old mnemonist. Generally, I think it's because I grew up in the right environment. I'm adopted, so I don't know if these skills are genetic, but I can attest to a lot of them being learned. My great-grandmother started reading to me incredibly early, which modeled reading as a behavior for me. As a librarian, I can see a huge difference in kids who read at home with family, and those who don't. I also had a mother who recognized a skill and nurtured it, and I went to a very wealthy public school that could differentiate instruction for me and put me in advanced-level classes. My organizational talents were being put to use as a page in a library as young as age 11.
So am I "special"? Probably not. But think about how many other "special" abilities can be found and celebrated in children if they are nurtured! Young children have such fascinating, expandable developing minds. It's like playing with Play-Do with certain kids. I see a lot of special abilities hidden in my own students, who haven't had the privileges as me. When I was tutoring 1st and 2nd graders in phonics, I saw them rapidly improve their reading abilities. I saw an illiterate 2nd grader who could barely write his own name suddenly read fluently and become very successful as an independent reader - all because I gave him the personal attention 4 days a week. I wonder what could happen if he were given more attention.
So are special abilities innate, or learned? I don't know completely. But I do know that the human brain is delicate and mysterious, and I love it. I love shaping my own mind, and watching children shape their own in my library.
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