Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time-Mark Haddon-Reviewed by Arunabha De (Chills & Thrills)

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” is a classic murder mystery novel with a creative touch. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Christopher Boone. He lives with his father who says Christopher’s mother is died from a heart attack. He knows little about humans and a lot about maths and has Asperger’s syndrome. He hates the colours yellow and brown and avoids being touched.

The story starts off with the murder of Christopher’s neighbour’s dog named Wellington. Christopher is said to be the culprit. Christopher, after getting his caution for hitting the police because they touched him, decided to do some investigation. His father had told him not to do so, but his will could not be stopped. He goes around his street finding clues about Wellington’s death and in a attempt to find his book where he was writing his clues for his father had taken it away, he found letters from his mother. As he read, he found a contradiction. The letters were written after his mother had died. He thought his mother may have never died and with this thought, he set on a journey to find her. Before, during and after his ride on the train, he faced several hardships and when he reached his mother (yay, joy!), the whole mystery unfolded in front of him. He found his father had killed Wellington.

This novel written by Mark Haddon has been given the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, the Guardian Children Fiction Prize and the South Bank Show Book Award and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Though the book is more for matured children and contains slangs, the story itself is very nice. The idea of writing about such an odd-mannered teen being exposed to things he can’t think of even in his dreams is a good idea and making the book unique by letting us know about the protagonist in such great depth and numbering the chapters after prime numbers is solid. I personally loved how Christopher’s thing with doing complex math and science and awkwardly hilarious actions in some parts were which also helped to simmer down the intense thrill but took away the flow of action for a little bit.

Book Rating - 8.7 /10.

Paperback: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1035679/the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time/9781784707637.html