just read ' the curious incident of the dog in the night time'...

[juicychops]

it was so good - sad and funny and i loved every page

i highly recommend

yes, I loved it .

I loved it too. So completely different to anything else I've ever read.

Delightful and eye-opening book - DS very similar

Yes, I agree, a really wonderful book, and (as far as I could tell) an interesting insight into Autism.

I saw the author speak at Brighton Book Festival a few years ago. He was great, really funny and entertaining and compassionate.

It's a fantastic book although in terms of autism as many people I know with it don't recognise themselves as do.

His book 'A spot of bother' is pretty good too.

You're right Peachy - thats the problem with ASD - it presents itself in so many different ways, but people often assume that anyone with ASD is like Rainman.

However for DS it ticks many boxes - he did read part of it before he got bored and gave up and said in a roundabout way that he was able to identify with the character which was a big source of delight for both of us for obviously different reasons.

I can see that.

The character is nothing like ds3 who is rare variant (passive, outgoing with no boundaries) but ds1 could see a ittle of himself (AS)

I have a friend who has autistic traits and her son is autistic and she could identify very well with the character.
I found the ride on the underground very frightening and upsetting.

It really is a hige spectrum; I have 2 boys on the spectrum and one beinga ssessed and if I didn;t feel uncomfortable as I study with the specilaist diagnostician, I could get an AS dx myself (have been told by Psych, as if I didn;t know that, been studying an MA in ASD for 2 years now LMAO)

None are the same, indeed the variations between the boys, and with me, are as big as in any family (though traditionally girls differe anyway within ASD).

I love the way it sparked an interest in people about ASD.

To be fair to the author, having read interviews with him about it - he didn't set out to specifically portray an ASD and he didn't research any specific conditions, he based christopher on a number of people he'd met while working as a carer.

It bugged me a bit when I first read it as it wasn't AS as I recognize it, but he didn't apply that label, that seems to have been the publisher and reviewers.

It is very cleverly written though, I love that anything stressful is followed by a chapter of maths

Absolutely tabulah, and he amde as good a job as possible.

I thought it was okay, but not really all that special. I certainly didn't feel it lived up to the massive media hype around it. There were some incredibly moving passages but it didn't hang together well enough as a whole for me.

I loved it! I read it to our DCs, and DS was abe to really enjoy a book that had a character he could identify with. Lots of chuckles and sweet spots.

I read this book just as some people were saying we think your son is autistic. Must admit it scared the bejuses out of me! My son will never understand that I love him? Forget everything else that was the one thing I got from this book and gave it to his Gran explaining that is how my son sees us :(. Good news is that after the test they said he has a couple of neurological disorders but not autism) Cant help but feel though for the new recruits to this disorder feeling like I will never matter to my son! I know they dont have emotions as we know it, but when he described his mum it hurt like hell to think that was the way my son seen me. Maybe being too sensitive (was a very bad point to my life, my son has also various physical disabilities so I was like oh come on!) Would be interested to know if anyone else found the book a scary interpretation of autism.

You know weekirkie current research says some ASD kids ahve mor emotion than average; and many have plenty but don;t know how to show it.

Am doing empathy and ASD research for Masters and can absolutely say there ARE no absolutes!
Autism can be scary; I know children who have compltely shit down. That is rare. DS3 is a very sensitivve little lad and still has ASD. DS1 has very little emotion except for himsel. He also has ASD.

My advice after eyars with the disorder from many angles (have worked with LD, parent to two maybe 23 asd kids, studying it now) is that the only description of autism that matters is the one that applies to your own child (or indeed for many oneself) - experience them as they are, joys and all, and just go with that.

A Spot of Bother is also very very good.

I read another book by a guy who is on the autistic spectrum 'Born on a Blue Day' which was also very good.

Must Stop using Also, Very and Good.

An emerging theory is that emotions are not modulated as with NT people. So they may be over amplified (and cause children to withdraw sometimes), dimmer or indeed fluctuating.

I suppose many of us find that anyway- we ahve days when we are emotional, others wher we are not. Magnify that and you get close.

Another theory is that there are different types of empathy- specifically CE (cognitive empathy, rational) and EE (emotional empathy)- an imbalance is likely to occur in ASD. I see this in my sons; ds1 is all CE which makes him very machiavellian and manipulative, whilst ds3 is the opposite and very full-hearted toddlerish.

I read the book at 11 and thought how different he was, that I didn't recognise him in anyone and that Aspergers wasn't too interesting, just another name. It only mentions it in the blurb.

We found out I had AS a few years later. You can't tell I've got it until you start talking to me or watch me trip over thin air, and just worrying about being with other people is the thing which "brings out" my symptoms- with my parents it's hardly noticeable. I can't compare myself to Christopher, he's not really "active but odd", like I definitely was/am. Even allowing for the fact that we're ages apart on the spectrum, he still seems completely distant to me and if anything, it does serve as an illustration of just how wide the spectrum is. Because when I reread it, I didn't get any feeling of "relating" to him. I'm not Mathsy and that's one of his main things. We did the book for AS and my teacher kept saying "people with Aspergers are obsessed with numbers and that kind of thing". Umm....really? Want to see me try to multiply fractions? So it doesn't do much to dispell myths. Probably says more for the standard of work than for the book, but I didn't bother reading it again, because the main gist is so cliche (amongst other reasons, like I'm bliddy lazy).

Hmm, some of that is just bad teaching though - I taught part of it last year, with younger pupils than that and that's not how I would describe it to them at all.

Like I said before, I liked the maths bits, not that I understood a massive amount of the actual maths, lol.

The way I pitched it was, people with ASDs often have very strong interest in one thing, for Christopher that's maths, he likes the orderliness of it, which is why you get a big explanation of something to do with maths when he's stressed, he retreats into his nice ordered interest when things in the real world are upsetting him - much the same way other people do with books or computer games, but because he doesn't make the same sense of the world, it's much more often.

But saying that AS automatically equals an interest in maths is just lazy teaching in my opinion, they've nit done enough research, though my DS has AS so I'd think that of a lot of teachers, lol

I was told to read it because people at school believed my son was AS. Asperger's. I'm not sure about that at all now, the older he gets the more neurotypical, and I read threads about AS and just don't recognise my son, although I did more when he was little.

If someone tells me to read a book because it will be "good for me" I react much as you would if someone puts something improving in front of you, "for your own good" it made me apt to be a resisting reader.

I read this book and it reminded me of the Barbara Cartland sketch in "Little Britain" where she fills her books with any old rubbish to get the page count up. Like, there's a whole chapter about getting on a bus told in micro detail. I just thought, what a waste of my time it was reading that.

It's certainly not a book that iw ould ever recommend to aprents. Maybe a little Luke Jackson, not this.

However interestingly have seen Mark Haddon interviewed and he was mortified the book was sold like this; and he can't get away from it either judging by the reviews for his other things on Amazon (although ds1, AS, adores Boom! and read it in a day).

Christopher is a charicature of a certain type of ASD person, that's all. If the book was about ds1 it would be very different but you now, ending every section with a bit on some geekt aspect of yugi-oh cards or a piccy of his latest jewellery creation would be apt. DS3's would have a score sheet for whatever computer game he currently worshipped / ticklist of BenTen Aliens and ds4 a list of Dr Who episodes watched.

Christopher's characted is just one person. Advising a parent or person with ASD to read it is silly.