Christine Lee

!Slight spoilers! I haven't completely finished this book yet but I don't really like how Christopher is characterized. This doesn't seem like a very accurate portrayal of autism/neurodivergency. It seemed like an interesting book at first but now I'm not so sure. His character in general seems to be pretty two-dimensional and shallow. His entire personality is based on the fact that he has autism; that is if you can even call that a personality. First of all, his thinking process. Purely logical. I understand that some people with autism are logical thinkers, but this just seems exaggerated and unrealistic. He takes everything literally. Everything. He doesn't have any sort of common sense, which is honestly sort of insulting, in my opinion. Having autism doesn't mean that you don't have critical thinking skills. He doesn't have any emotion or empathy towards others either, except for his pet rat and the dead dog. I don't understand why he was written like this. Autism ≠ not having human emotions. I want to see Christopher's development throughout the story and his thoughts about the situation, his personal feelings and his emotions. Not just a bland narration from his perspective. His character is just so boring. I'm easily entertained so I'll give this book a 2/5, but honestly, a 1/5 seems justifiable.

I had heard about this book many times before, and most of the people who told me about it said it was boring, or that it was terrible and I should never read it. I finished the book today, and I can surely say that those people were completely wrong, or never understood the meaning behind the book. It was a very interesting concept and story. There is a lot of symbolism, and you can actively see those symbols change and develop as the story progresses. There is a lot of character development as well (the bad kind) and there's a lot more to this book than what the surface shows. It was great, and though a bit morbid, I really enjoyed reading this.

The first time I read this book I despised it so much that I basically erased most of the content from my memory. However, after reading it again with a more open mind, I found that I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to. If you do decide to read this book I would recommend you read it more than once, because it's quite possible that your perspective will change over time. Also because you might catch a lot of things that you missed the first time.