Book Review: The Rosie Project

Lately, I have been hitting the good book mother load. 

As in, I've been so buried in them I don't have time to write about how good they are. 

Which is just a shame because my favorite thing about good books is telling people about them and nearly ruining the plot for them.  Just kidding, I would never do that, I promise. 

So, I bring you The Rosie Project

"An international sensation, this hilarious, feel-good novel is narrated by an oddly charming and socially challenged genetics professor on an unusual quest: to find out if he is capable of true love."

This book has the most lovable unlovable character I've ever met. Don Tillman is a genetics professor who is so socially challenged, it made me giggle out loud. He's oddly charming, too smart to relate to normal people and over the top obsessive compulsive. All things that have been stacked up against him and his goal to find a wife. Until he decides to start the Wife Project. He comes up with pages and pages of questions he thinks he can hand to women to fill out and it will help him weed out the ones he deems ill-equipped for marriage.  

He times his evenings down to the minute. He has a system for the meals that he prepares identically each week. He is literally living on autopilot. I wanted to believe at first he was just a little kid with an "aw, shucks" personality, whose mother just cut up his steak for one too many years as a child, but as I read more about Don's character, I began to realize that he was an adult with a brilliant mind that was struggling to handle social norms. The book explores many interesting facets of autism and human nature. Topics which I've found myself skirting around, never fully understanding or comprehending. Don's story changed that for me. I don't get it all now, but somehow, Simision really hit the nail on the head by creating a character whose shoes are so well written, you feel like you actually are walking in them.

Don knows that he should have a wife because that is what is expected in life, but he doesn't have the capabilities of understanding the concept of loving a woman enough to marry her. 

Until he meets Rosie. 

Now, if I thought I loved Don, then I love Rosie just as much. She's punky, she's sassy, she's smart. But she's also hurt and a little lost and desperately searching for any connection to a life that means something. She has a question she's been searching to answer her whole life and stumbling upon a obsessive-compulsive, lonely genetics professor weirdly  has a way to help her find it. 

“But I’m not good at understanding what other people want.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ said Rosie for no obvious reason.

I quickly searched my mind for an interesting fact. 

‘Ahhh…The testicles of drone bees and wasp spiders explode during sex.” 

― Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Project

Both Rosie and Don are completely caught off guard by the concept of love. One, because she wasn't even looking. And the other, because he didn't even know he was capable of it. 

There are were twists in this story, but for the most part, I knew how it was going to end. Normally, I'd put that in a con category but I loved Don and Rosie so much, knew they went together so essentially, that I was okay with the predictability.  I was surprised and satisfied at the same time. It was just that kind of book.

My recommendation? Read it. Read it on a weekend where you are feeling a little disenchanted by the power of love, or when you are tired of thinking people don't still do nice things for each other. Because they do. Because love is still enchanting. Nice, compassionate people who care about others, who want to do each other favors, who are genuinely affected by what happens to the people around them, they do exist. Sometimes it just takes our own selves to move outside of our comfort zones, to ignore social barriers or norms, and scale those obstacles to find each other. For Rosie and Don, for me in my own life, jumping those walls has been worth all the while.