A Good Read
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Wellington is dead. He was killed with a fork. That’s not quite so odd though. It was a garden fork. Discovering the body of his neighbour’s dog, 15 year old Christopher is determined to find out what happens so he decides to do some ‘detecting’. What he discovers will tell him so much more than just who killed Wellington.
As a reader you see the world through Christopher’s eyes. A world where maths is in charge and helps to make sense of everything. A world where seeing five red cars in a row is a sign of a ‘super good
day.’ Christopher has Asperger’s Syndrome: a form of high functioning autism. This means that he doesn’t see things the same as others do. Facial expressions are difficult to decode – his teacher gives him clues to help him – and metaphors are just confusing and don’t really help you to understand things because you have to spend so much time trying to work out what it means.
This highly acclaimed novel is an insight into a world inhabited by many people, but alien to most of the population. Haddon also brings out the difficulties of raising a child with Asperger’s. His widowed father tries to be patient but struggles with the lack of emotion from his son. In many ways Christopher has a better way of coping with life as he can shut himself away in a world ruled by algebra, patterns, and prime numbers.
Written in the first person, Christopher’s ‘voice’ is distinctive and original. As the novel draws towards its rewarding ending you will feel reluctant to leave him as he takes the next steps through life, telling us, “I can do anything.” And like many people with Asperger’s, he just might.
Jack Stalwart: The deadly race to space: Russia by Elizabeth Singer Hunt
Most nine year olds only have school to worry about. Jack’s life is a bit more complicated than that. He is a secret agent. It must run in the family as his older brother Max was also a secret agent: only he has now gone missing. Jack must travel around the world battling some of the most dangerous villains there are, in the hope that he will one day find Max.
In this book (the ninth in the series) Jack must find the space project’s chief engineer who has gone missing on the eve of the launch of manned mission to Mars. With his spy gadgets, such as gripper gloves and a mind eraser, this appears to be straightforward, but Jack is in for a shock.
The Jack Stalwart books are aimed at young readers aged 7+ and appear to be a natural draw for boys of this age. Hunt cleverly mixes fiction and non-fiction in this series. Each book is set in a different country and contains factual information as part of the story, plus ‘fact file’ pages in the book. This age is a tricky one when it comes to reading, especially for boys, and the fast- pace of the story, plus the non-fiction aspect is a definite plus.
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