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I read this to help a student with their English course. Its popularity in the UK is so immense that it's recently been made into a West End show, a tribute I don't think even HP can boast... I found it a very quick read and I related hugely to Christopher; it's quite tempting for me to write a series of anecdotes about my own tribulations here instead of talking about the book. But I will resist.

The scenario is classic YA/teen fiction: teen struggles with issues including but not limited to imperfect parents. Yet the plot, the style, the appeal of this book rests on Christopher's autistic spectrum disorder and the reader's experience of his viewpoint. It's really enjoyable being in his mind, especially if you like physics and maths. Haddon creates limitless sympathy for Christopher of course, and no matter how he behaves I root for him. When an adult, especially his Dad, gets annoyed with Christopher and behaves towards him in an unhelpful or harmful way, I thought, what a fool this person is being. The plentiful humour is usually at the expense of such fools, or comes from redescription of the familiar: “I didn't say anything because Mrs Alexander was doing what is called chatting which is when people talk in a way that isn't questions and answers and isn't connected�.

I appreciate that Christopher's difficulties arise in context; they are created by others, and by time and resource limitations that affect working class folks. This is reflected by his frequent fantasies of being alone. The neurotypical reader can understand how someone with ASD may be harmed or confused by others, and hopefully, behave with more empathy in future. But I did feel uncomfortable that this character, who will be read as representative of people with Asperger's en masse, was created by a presumably neurotypical author who says he didn't bother to actually research ASD. Even though, whether researched or not, the portrayal could not be accurate for all people with ASD, and there are aspects of the book that work against easy misconceptions (Christopher writes that the school's psychologist thinks he likes numbers because they are safe and straightforward, but he thinks “This is because Mr Jeavon doesn't understand numbers�), I still think it would have been much more respectful to actually do that research. I would have chosen a book written by a person with ASD instead if I had had the choice, but I guess that experience would not have been so easy and comfortable, and the question to ask myself now is, am I glad that this easy and comfortable book exists to raise awareness among young people, even if it's a problematic act of ventriloquism? I guess the answer is yes.

More subtly, the novel presents Christopher as a sponge of cliché and stereotype; when he talks about the people in the special school as 'stupid' or reflects that he could find a 'lady' to marry so that somebody would be around to wait on him, the absence of 'politically correct' framing exposes the ableism and sexism he has absorbed. If this were a little better anchored in other aspects of the narrative I wouldn't be concerned about some readers taking such comments for wisdom rather than violence.