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• Author: Mark Haddon
• Category: Fiction - Adventure/Autism

Effectively ‘Dog’ would be a story categorized almost as a children’s book, if it did not deal with a handful of issues that are rather adult in nature. The main character is Christopher, an autistic 15 year old who sets out to write a detective novel trying to determine who it was, exactly, that killed his neighbor’s dog Wellington. And what starts out to be a rather simple journey turns instead into an adventure of self discovery of larger proportions.

Having worked with autistic kids for a number of years, Mark Heddon brings to this book a realistic tale told through the eyes of a child that seems his environment in entirely different ways. The result is an eye opening experience that would do a lot of people good in coming to understand the way the autistic mind works. It is an interesting, unique, moving story, which keeps innocence at its core.

In turn both touching and comic (despite Christopher’s promise to be otherwise, given his inability to tell or understand jokes), ‘Dog’ is an insightful tale that opens doorways into a unique character, his world and his family, none of whom are perfect, all of whom are likeable and all of them struggling to try to juggle a difficult situation as best as possible, leaving in the end, a significant amount of hope.

Rating: 4 out of 5
Notes: Told through the eyes of an autistic child, this story does not read as a simple novel, starting with the fact that chapter numbers are not your typical cardinal numbers but rather a sequence of prime numbers and ending with the fact that his own mathematical mind has such a liking for puzzles and algebraic challenges that the read itself often becomes a curious puzzle itself.