The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time: A New Kind Of Hero We Need To Know.

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At the risk of sounding ignorant (okay, of admitting ignorance), I feel as though I've gained ten times as more insight into Asperger's Syndrome than I had before I read this. I don't know whether Haddon did ten months of research, or ten years, or ten days, but I believe him--as if he, the author, is unable to lie just like Christopher John Francis Boone, the story's hero. The subject of truth makes plenty cameos, but they are not all are as simple as a question and an honest-to-God answer (especially since Christopher is steadfastly atheist).

This is how Haddon captivates you: as you follow his story, you realize that the hard lines and angles of Christopher's mind are not as solid as he, Christopher, initially promises. He simply tells us that he cannot tell lies, as if the wiring of his brain doesn't permit it. Yet, as we follow the narrative, we learn that his staggering ability to tell the truth matches his penchant for half-truths, white lies and even deception.

Christopher's deception is borne of a passionate desire to write a book about the murder of a neighbor's dog. The presence of passion in the heart of someone who is all brain, so to speak, makes you root for him, especially when his dishonesty is crafted so closely to the margins of his own logical mandate of telling the truth. Here is a boy with social skills so lacking he barks at those who come near, yet he shares the same lofty ambition with every person who ever took a writing class.

 of beguiling truth bring a largely unfamiliar kind of mind and the more typical mind together, separated by difference that seems only as thick as a mirror. Things so dissonant as math and literature seem not like the antitheses to each other but rather like distant relatives, the kind you meet awkwardly and then suddenly feel you've known forever.

Like an actual sibling or relative, you will get fed up with Christopher, but not ever enough to abandon him. His honesty and careful effusiveness as a writer leaves you so little room to not understand the parts of him that are dark and profoundly human. A strong pinch of your happiness depends on his fate, especially when he discovers who really killed that dog. Christopher is curious, determined, scared, and far more like you than you expect.

If you haven't read this yet, do. Haddon gives us the pleasure of a gripping story, and a sense of clarity that turns Asperger's and autism on its heels to appear less like disability and more as a difference for us to put against the back drop of our own scattered minds.

4 out of 5 stars

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said the main character in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has autism. While that isn't necessarily false, the clarification must be made that Christopher has Asperger's Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Click here to learn what the difference is under "Characteristics."

The Fault In Our Stars: Refreshing, Heartbreaking, and Triumphantly Un-put-down-able

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We don't tend to love books whose main characters are terminal. We spend our days occupying ourselves with work and play to avoid the reality that since we are all aging, we are all dying. No one leaps at the chance to read the story of a girl with stage 4 thyroid cancer--too depressing. I'm telling you now to not let that determine your decision whether to pick this one up. As someone with his own fear complex regarding death and oblivion, I can say without a doubt that The Fault In Our Stars is the exception.

On the first page, Hazel, the protagonist, says "But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)" From there on out, the tone is set. Hazel's statement sounds depressing at first, but really, she is giving us some very good news: since everything is a side effect of dying, and everything we do can be considered the matter that makes up our lives, then dying is evidence that we have lived, that we wear our existence in the form of cuts on our knees, white hair, and laugh lines branching from the outmost corners of our eyes. Dying means that you existed.

Granted, I don't think I've cried more from reading a book than when I read this. John Green makes it near impossible to not love Hazel and Augustus, the "gorgeous plot-twist" she meets at a cancer support group. Both characters are drawn with dry senses of humor, sharp wit and profound perspectives on what it means to be alive and fall in love. From what I gathered, it usually means accepting the fact that joys and tragedies are often concomitant of one another. When something builds up joy, that joy, by having simply been built, is at risk of being brought down by one of the myriad side effects of dying (or living).

If there were ever a call to action in Green's novel, it would be to let yourself do both. Live and love despite the ensuing tragedy of one day losing what you love or being lost from the world yourself. Tomorrow, after all, is guaranteed to no one. Cancer grows without an eye for the character or benevolence of its host, and cars with distracted drivers come out of nowhere. Which, I guess, is a dramatic way of saying, shit happens.

Here's a minor/major spoiler alert depending on how you read. It speaks loudly and clearly to the very idea of shit happening and it not being our fault.

If you're anything like the twelve-year-old school girl living in my brain, you'll love that Green references the title in the novel. It happens when Augustus writes to Hazel's favorite author for her in an attempt to get him explain the ending of her favorite book. They get a letter back from him, and he points out that the "Shakespearean complexity of [their] tragedy," stems from how ill Hazel is at this point and how not ill Augustus is, a microcosmic comparison of all the sick people in the world and all those that are healthy:

"Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is in the nature of our stars to cross and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves'... but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars."

The 'Fault,' capital F, in our stars is the simple metaphor of life's gargantuanly complex (spoiler: Green likes adverbs) and relentless nature. The biggest fault in us, and there definitely is one, is denying ourselves the indulgence of what we love. Regardless of the paths our stars make when they cross, though terrible they may be, refusing to take part is to refuse the prospect of happiness and all its side effects. For compassion, we sacrifice our contentedness, and then live with the eruptions of both joy and tragedy that wear on both our skin and our two hearts--the one physically beating in our chests and the figurative one that makes us beat on our chests.

As a playful Augustus puts it:

"... [even when] the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us."
"They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly... But something in their iron robot hearts will yearn to have lived and died as we did: on the hero's errand."

Green's novel is the exception to the sad-cancer-genre for this reason: it makes it absolutely clear that rewarding our survival with joy is, in fact, heroic.

5 out of 5 stars

Golden Boy: What happens when a prominent family tries to hide the fact that their son is both male and female? A story fit for tabloids.

The point of the irrevocable, and those who either walk past it willingly or are dragged by the betrayal of another, all make for a good story. In Golden Boy that line is crossed early on, though I won't say how exactly because that will ruin it. The rest of the novel shows the quiet, ebullient free-fall of intersex Max and his mother Karen; the fierce, and persistent war-cries of his ten-year old brother, Daniel, who wants (and deserves) to be taken seriously; and the unwavering acceptance of his father, Steve. You see, Max is special: an over-achieving, angelically good-looking star-athlete who is at once both male and female, and yet, neither as well. He is what we no longer in polite society call, a hermaphrodite.

You can't help but imagine Abigail Tarttelin thinking up the story: Pupils dilated with anticipation of the chaos that would ensue after giving two publicly prominent figures an intersex love-child. Yet, there is a tenderness to Tarttelin's writing. She is not a Pan, God of Mischief. She's more like the grown-up version of a child who likes to smash her toys and see how they come apart. Tarttelin, unlike a precocious brat surrounded by dismembered dinosaurs, knows how to put things back together and then some.

Secrets are revealed and the characters stretch desperately like rubber bands and snap back, often with understanding, and often with more questions than answers. The largest question being, is being normal really worth it? In exploring this idea, we come to understand the difference between behaving normally, and seeming normal to those looking in (which, in the Walkers' case, is the whole damn town). The definition of normal is turned and tossed like a raw pizza dough. You'll find that as Max learns more about his body (with the help of the underplayed Dr. Archie Verma) both the definition of normalcy and very value of mimicking those around him ebb and flow. Being normal may take more energy than he realizes, and giving up on that endeavor might really be the courageous effort of loving his whole self, the leap of acceptance he needs to survive.

If anything, this book is a lesson in reacting to the idea that something is "wrong" with you. With a remarkable wisdom, Tarttelin asks all the questions for us and answers them only so much as to leave room for our sense of wonder to still buzz in the margins. Like a true British novelist, she abides by the law that, like the dead, secrets will up like weeds in the garden, and when they do sprout, havoc will reek. That is, until someone throws tidiness to the wind and digs elbow deep to take care of it.

(Side note: while reading this, I put together that "hermaphrodite" is the marriage of Hermes, and Aphrodite, two gods who I'm pretty sure banged and as a result, conceived a child called Hermaphroditos. Neat, huh?)

4 out of 5 stars