Official Review: The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

[kayla1080]

This is a really sweet story of an unconventional guy finding love. Don is our hopeless main character- he is super analytical, can’t read emotions, has poor social skills, and everything in his life is measured. A lot of the time he reminds me of someone with Asperger’s syndrome, and Don has admitted that he has signs of autism. He reminds me of Sheldon in the Big Bang Theory and Adam in the movie Adam.

Don grew up with a younger brother, who he considers a redneck, and a sister who he was close to that deceased a couple of years ago. His dad runs a hardware store, and his mom calls on Sundays and checks on him regularly. Don feels like when he got to a certain age, his parents lost interest in him. At a time after his sister’s death, Don was depressed because he lacked friends, sex and a social life, plus psychiatrists diagnosed him with a mild case of OCD.

Don is a genetics professor and has two real friends, Gene and his wife Claudia. Gene is a professor at a higher level than Don, and Gene and Claudia have an open relationship. Don seeks advice from both of them as they are an integral part in helping Don develop social skills.

One day, Don decided that he needed to find a wife, so he started the Wife Project. Gene helped him develop a questionnaire to find his perfect match, and he went to speed-dating events, attended parties, and put his questionnaire out there. While it was circulating around, he met Rosie.

Don meets Rosie at a restaurant for their “first date” but starts off poorly with the Jacket Incident. After getting kicked out, Don ends up making dinner at his house for Rosie. She paces around and rearranges his furniture, which drives Don mad, but goes along with it and views Rosie in a “permanently manic state”.

Rosie is a feminist vegetarian (who’ll eat sustainable seafood) and a unique sense of style. Don regards her as the “most beautiful woman he’s ever seen”. Her mother died in a car crash when she was younger, and found out that her mom was kind of promiscuous. She had a rough relationship with “Phil”, her substitute father throughout her life, and wanted to find her biological father.

Don starts adapting to her, by starting to “go with the flow”, creating “Rosie Time”, and concedes to having alcohol on Tuesdays. Rosie enlightens Don to the beauty around him, gets him to view things in a different way and even teaches him how to do air quotes. Rosie somehow responds well to his odd mannerisms.

After that first date, Don realizes he had fun, and finds reasons to see her again, but doesn’t view her as Wife Project material. However, Rosie went to Don in a quest to find her biological father, kickstarting the Father Project.

Don finds that he enjoys rearranging his schedule to focus on the Father Project for Rosie. In turn, Rosie taught Don to be more social and tried to not let his close-mindedness get to her.

As part of the Father Project, Rosie and Don went to New York City to find a possible DNA match. To Don, this was like being in another world. He enjoyed the directness of New Yorkers (a bartender said, “everybody’s weird, so we all fit in together here”) and even made another friend at a Yankees game. For the first time in his life Don felt satisfaction. (The whole experience actually reminded me of the rewiring of neurons in one’s brain like in the book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza.)

Don can be harsh and critical because of how his brain “isn’t wired like everyone else’s” and we see that Rosie is pretty tolerant of his bluntness, but there comes a time when she can’t accept him because of his inability to love.

Unfortunately, this is In the midst of Don’s transformation, and now he’s hooked on Rosie. His friends, such as Claudia, noticed him start to change in subtle ways due to Rosie’s influence.

He couldn’t pick up on romantic cues. Don watched a bunch of romantic movies, but he felt absolutely no emotion. They did not help him develop feeling, but he did realize that he loved Rosie. His analytical mind also understood that love is a powerful feeling that defies logic.

Now it was just getting Rosie to accept him for who he is.

Without giving too much away, I will tell you that this is an unconventional romance with a happy ending. My librarian recommended this book to me and placed me in the queue to read the sequel, The Rosie Effect. I give this book 4 out of 4 stars, and I think you should read it before it turns into a movie.

[gali]

Duplicated topic

The Rosie Project