The Rosie Project

So the first time I read The Rosie Project is in 2013. I haven't read the other books in this series. I wanted to read them all so, I thought this was the best time to read it again. I remember the book to be an engaging and entertaining read. I still felt the same this time around as well. The book left me feeling happy. It was funny, well written and charming.

Took a while to get into, but ultimately very entertaining, scattered with numerous bonus nuggets of genetics and psychology knowledge (thank goodness he changed his original plans to make Don a physicist - would have lost my interest early on). It is very filmic and I wasn't surprised to read that the author had written it as a screenplay - though converting it into a novel requires a whole different level of skill, and he does it pretty well. Will see what the rest of the book group have to say about it.Incidentally I wish there was a "book group" option on Amazon so that several used copies of the same book could be sent together, making postage more economical - when I have ordered 2 or more of the same one, they always arrive individually. It would be a good way for a seller to shift titles they are overstocked with, too!

“I may have found a solution to the Wife Problem. As with so many scientific breakthroughs, the answer was obvious in retrospect.”I have had the privilege of knowing some wonderful individuals ‘on the spectrum’, which predisposes me to enjoy such protagonists in fiction. Don Tillman is no exception – an endearing character, whose intellectual brilliance, social ineptitude, emotional differences and individuality are well portrayed. A 39-year-old geneticist, he’s never had a second date, so he devises The Wife Project, a questionnaire to find the perfect partner. Not great literature, but an entertaining read, of which I have only one criticism, that the bit-part characters were too many for me to bother remembering, so towards the end I was flawed by some references that lacked reminders, and I had to read the final two pages several times and hunt back for relevant scenes to make sense of the reveal. The reveal, once I was sure of it, was clever and satisfying.

I loved this book. Very few books have genuinely made me laugh out loud, which this book has done. The writer does a very good job at developing a strong character identity for the protagonist who is smart, funny and adorable with all his quirks and differences. An easy and enjoyable book to read that I couldn't put down and that I would definitely recommend. I can't wait to read the next one and see how the story develops.

An amusing and easy to read romantic comedy, with the twist being that the narrator Don is conveyed as an undiagnosed autistic savant. The plot relies heavily on a caricature of ASD for comic effect, and I was a little uncomfortable with that in parts. Also I felt Don's sudden self awareness and ability to socially adapt by the end of the story was implausible. So, with a few reservations I did enjoy the storyline, there were quite a few laugh out loud moments, and the ending was pretty much as expected.

I loved this book from start to finish, and really loved the narrative of Don - it just works, and it's his issues that make it all the more readable. There's nothing shocking or any major plot twists or developments in this book - it actually doesn't need them at all. Instead, it's reading about Don trying to explore a new world to him that is so compulsive, working out how to be around people without saying the wrong thing, or learning that going over schedule by 10 minutes isn't the end of the world, as he fears at the beginning of his story. Yes, for me I could see the end coming, and I had hoped that it would be as it was, it seemed the right ending somehow. But I loved reading about Don Tillman. There's some interesting genetics facts thrown in along the way courtesy of Don, but aside from that it's a book about Asperger's and about human relationships. It certainly enlightened me, showed a view of the world that I knew nothing about before picking up The Rosie Project, yet had me smiling and laughing along, hoping for a love story from these two people, very different yet oddly similar to each other. The writing is brilliant, the story one you will want to keep reading until you reach the last page - for me, The Rosie Project was a joy to read, and a gem of a book. Highly, highly recommended.