When I first stumbled on Mark Haddon's novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, I figured it would be a good final book to finish off the $150 Borders Gift Certificate that Santa brought me. I'd filled my arms with fairly pithy books that promised days of intense reading and needed something of a simple page turner after just finishing House of Leaves. The premise of a mystery told from the point of view of a boy with Asperger's syndrome immediately caught my attention. Instead of scooting the book to the bottom of my stack (in order of future read) I kept it on top. Then I opened the book and the first paragraph completely sucked me in:
It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears' house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog.
Something about the narrator's tone, the preciseness of the imagery, the dead dog, all led to me wanting more, and before I knew it, I was staring at the appendix still clamoring for more.
Not that Haddon's story doesn't resolve itself. Christopher John Francis Boone, the story's narrator, sets off on a quest to find the dog's killer. In doing so, he also discovers secrets about his life that had been kept from him by an overprotective father. Christopher's world is one of formulas and numbers. In a world where the two sides of the formula don't often equal, he has set up rules (doesn't like the colors yellow or brown) that help him cope. He sees the "normal" world as not living up to his particular expectations. In some ways, he helps redefine what is normal for those around him.
