Students should be able to discuss how reading a book with “an unreliable narrator” impacts their understanding of the story. However, that narrator, the autistic boy Christopher Boone, is not the only unreliable person in the book. Both of Christopher’s parents have abdicated their responsibilities to a large degree. Mr. Boone has concealed his affair with his neighbor, Mrs. Shears, and told his son his mother is dead. Mrs. Boone has abandoned her son and run off to London to begin a new life with Mr. Shears. The adults have literally “sheared away” Christopher’s world so that the boy must make sense of it how he can.
Students might begin a discussion...
