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Terrific, unique and thrilling to read! This is a wonderfully entertaining and touching and sometimes frustrating book. What first attracted me to it was the basic premise...a mystery (the "murder" of a neighbor's dog) investigated by an autistic boy...told through the eyes of the boy himself. Christopher, our narrator, is as unlikely a hero as you're going to encounter in a piece of fiction that isn't science fiction or fantasy based. Apparently Mark Haddon worked with autistic people for awhile, and his knowledge of their traits clearly informs the book. It is a novel with a hero that is incapable of showing empathy or even sympathy for others. He is totally self-involved and pretty well insulated. Yet his unique humanity shines through. What's also terrific in Haddon's approach is that while Christopher cannot really tell us what other people are thinking or feeling...we empathize with them anyway. Whole pages of dialogue are given without any inkling from the narrator as to what tone of voice people are using, what their faces are showing (he doesn't like to even look at people's faces), etc...yet the crispness of the dialogue leaves no doubt. We see through Christopher's blindness to the "normal" people beyond. Yet we also buy into Christopher's world-view pretty easily, and we actually have a basic sense of how he needs to cope. For example, when people try to touch Christopher, he may begin screaming or banging his head on the ground. Imagine how embarrassing and frustrating this must be for his parents, how annoying or startling for those around him! We can feel, as a "normal" person, that Christopher is frustrating kid. Yet from Christopher we also know that he doesn't like to be touched, it's too much stimulus and by screaming or groaning or banging, he finds some escape. And sometimes that escape can't stop because he doesn't dare risk stopping to see if he's no longer being touched, only to discover that he IS still being touched. Hence, the screaming goes on. In Christopher's matter-of-fact manner, we see how he isn't really doing anything "wrong." The book really doesn't turn into much of a mystery about the death of a dog. It's full of amusing or inciteful digressions...as Christopher shows us how he can't understand things like facial expressions, but is brilliant at turning everyday problems into mathematical problems. I suspect he may be a "higher functioning" autistic person than most or many, but he has to be in order to write the book in the first place. Towards the later part of the book, Christopher takes an enormously brave journey, venturing into a world he knows virtually nothing about. You can feel the fear in him, the isolation and the bravery. And yes, even some pride. It's a wrenching and dramatic final act, and at this point the book is pretty much impossible to put down. The true story behind the story is the relationship of Christopher to his father, and to a few other key people in his life. And when the end of the book comes, we find that we can actually be moved to tears by the events that have taken place. It's a riveting and unique book. There are a few casual bad words or phrases in the book (mostly Christopher seeing graffiti and reporting it to us) and thus I wouldn't recommend it for anyone under, say 15 or so...but I think it's brief enough, fast-paced enough, and just well-written and entertaining enough to be for almost anyone who enjoys reading.