This short book is engrossing largely because of the way it presents the story from the point of view of the main character, Christopher, who has a case of Asperger's syndrome which is pronounced but not completely incapacitating. The messy lives of the people around him, his parents and the neighbors and the people at school lead to plenty of complications when they impinge on the non-negotiable areas of his inner state. It gets even more tricky when Christopher finds that he has to go out into the world by himself and deal with unfamiliar places and people coming from a fragile inner place. This gives the story a lot of forward motion as you are waiting to see what he is able to discover on his own, and how far he is able to go in a world not set up for the kind of person he is. No one in the story is perfect (though Christopher's teacher Siobhan comes close), with their individual faults mixed with heroic qualities, and it is fascinating to see how well he is able to make sense of what's going on inside each of their heads.

It adds up to an emotional journey with built-in suspense as you are given few clues as to what the final configuration of characters is going to be. The audiobook narration adds an additional dimension as he seems to capture the affect of Christopher more successfully than I could imagine on my own.