The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion

Don Tillman lives a perfectly ordered and structured life. He has a weekly timetable of food (lobster on Tuesdays) and goes jogging every day to purchase the fresh ingredients for it. He works at his local university and happily goes about his day to day business with painstaking attention to detail. The only thing missing in his life is another person, a wife to be more specific, and after a few unsuccessful dates, Don decides to put his attention to detail to work and designs a questionnaire to allow him to select the most perfect candidate to become his wife. His best friend, Gene, a womaniser of the world, decides to help him out by screening the candidates. Therefore Don is touched when Gene sends Rosie to Don. However it quickly becomes clear that Rosie is far from wife material and ticks very few boxes on the questionnaire. Indeed she is almost the complete opposite of what Don was looking for. And yet, there is something about Rosie which means that Don finds ways and means of staying friends with her. Searching for Rosie’s real father is ideal, since Don’s background is genetics. For fans of the Big Bang Theory, the best way I can describe the protagonist is that Don Tillman is like Sheldon Cooper. That is where the similarities start and end, and in some ways, Don seems more real than Sheldon is. Although Don is never overtly described as Autistic or having Asperger’s syndrome, it’s more than obvious that he does suffer from some version of it. The story is written in the first person and Don’s thoughts and emotions are captured perfectly. It is easy to bring Don to life and to see him as a socially inept professor, attempting to maintain the order in his life. It is hard not to like Don and especially towards the end of the book, I found myself feeling quite protective of him. Innocent and childlike in many respects, Don is taking baby steps to having a “normal” life, and it’s hard not to feel like a proud parent as he begins to make those moves.

Rosie is slightly harder to bring to life, but she is described beautifully through Don’s eyes, and although we know about her through what she chooses to tell Don, the reader is still able to see her actions and thoughts separately from Don.

There are many funny moments in the book, although they tend to occur at the expense of Don and his mis-interpreting of a situation. But you never feel that you are laughing at Don.

The interesting thing about the book is that it does make you look at things differently. Don reads social situations in a completely different way to most people, and his interpretation of events, and what people say, makes you realise how much in communication is taken for granted and that not everyone picks up on the social nuances and behaviours that we assume everyone has.

The books has some lovely sweet moments in, and a few sad moments that were very bitter-sweet. But the ending was wonderfully written and definitely not what I was expecting. This book was refreshingly enjoyable and as well as a good read, makes you think a little bit more about the day to day parts of our lives which pass by us and we don’t notice.