I love this book to bits. It reminds me a lot of unanswered questions I once asked myself when I was small yet I never got around to them simply because I didn’t want to be labelled as weird or stupid. After reading this book, I realised I was just plain curious back then and being one obviously makes me think more than I should. For better or worse? It depends.
This is a funny tale told in an oddly intelligent way by Christopher, a fifteen-year-old, with autism. The story starts off with the dog of Christopher's neighbour found murdered in the middle of the night and he decides to investigate who the murderer is. He is encouraged by his teacher/mentor to write a book about his investigations. Feeling emboldened for the sake of finding out the truth, he starts his investigating by talking to strangers, which is a big step for him considering his antisocial behaviour. In the process of his investigation, he later finds out his mother is not dead, as claimed by his father. Instead she lives in London with another man and for two years she has been writing letters to him, only to be kept from him by his father. Angered and feared of his father's dishonesty and violence, he sets off his journey to find his mother, where a string of events take place during the journey, which I think they only make him braver and more in touch with the outside world like buying train tickets, getting a map and looking for his mother's address, etc. It might sound easy to us but for Christopher, it is a big step.
As I am not familiar with how an autistic mind thinks so it only makes this book all the more interesting to me. For the most part, I felt a strong sympathy for Christopher as a lot of times he struggles within himself to be normal yet he simply cant. He doesn’t think and act like his normal peers. He is into mathematics and science and his mind works better when he thinks in logic. He doenst understand human emotions and he feels particularly baffled when people communicate using non-verbal communications like facial expressions and different kinds of gestures as he thinks they are ambiguous and more often than not he finds them incongruous. He doesn’t get long sentences with excessive embellishment of adjectives and descriptive phrases as they find them rather distracting. He is confused by sign which says "Be quiet" and feels it is ridiculously absurd as for how long one should stay quiet as it is not clearly instructed. He resents yellow and brown colours and will not eat food that are touching each other on his plate. One thing I find really interesting is he justifies why one should have food they like or hate because it helps you make choices easier when deciding what to eat. There are some other behavioral problems or idiosyncrasies he has and for the most part, I just feel sorry for him when he is deemed incapable of understanding other people and get brusque treatment in return. On the other hand, he makes me laugh out loud about things he says and does - just weird but funny.
I think this is a book about how to overcome your fear to communicate and deal with the real world that you don’t seem to fit in. As this story is narrated from the first-person perspective by Christopher, we get to see how he feels in his world - the very same world that we all live in - in a different way and it is such an eye-opening experience reading a book about someone who is very different from the rest of us.
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