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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night by Mark Haddon

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Author Mark Haddon has written an astounding novel that is a social breakthrough of understanding the developmental disorder of autism. He does so through the main character that is an autistic British boy named Christopher. The main idea of his story starts when Christopher discovers his neighbor's poodle murdered in her yard. This boy idolizes Sherlock Holmes, and so he sets out to solve the mystery of who was responsible for the dog’s murder. The struggles he faces throughout the book begins with him being a boy with ASD, making him uneasy with social interactions, understanding emotions and processing his own feelings and reactions. A very literal and scholarly young boy, Christopher takes an approach very similar to that of an actual detective, being able to deconstruct life and its concepts to human laws and equations where purely logic and facts rule the situation. The only problem he runs into is that the search requires emotions and empathy to accept what he discovers as the crime is uncovered. As research student Rubina Lal has said in her own research of ASD and its effects on social interactions, “Autism is a developmental disorder that affects a child’s perception of the world and how the child learns from his or her experiences. Even among the most complex disabilities, autism remains an enigma” (Lal, 1). As the book progresses, the reader discovers how his parents and peers have a hard time working with him and his disability, so he is somewhat alone along the

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