Discussion date: January 10, 2005

What we thought:

Some of us found this book brilliant in the way it so convincingly created the voice of an autistic boy, whose story is at once suspenseful and tragic -- yet moving and hopeful. A few were turned off by the occasional math problems popping up on the page (which Elizabeth's husband told her were accurate!) or didn't find the story plausible. We couldn't agree about whether the father was ultimately a sympathetic character, but we were all very impressed by the skillfulness of his teacher.

These quotes from an interview with the author are worth repeating:

"What I was trying to do in Curious Incident [was] to take a life that seemed horribly constrained, to write about it in the kind of book that the hero would read - a murder mystery - and hopefully show that if you viewed this life with sufficient imagination it would seem infinite."

"I am usually wary of writers with a message. But if Curious Incident has a message it is this, that no-one is a stranger, that the people we turn away from in the street are more like us than we dare admit, that the things we have in common will always outweigh the things which separate us."

NOTE: Special thanks to Marcia B. for the tour of her uniquely remodeled home and her very impressive collection of paintings.