The Rosie Project

I am part of a reading challenge on Good Reads and this was the book that was chosen for February. This is not the genre I typically choose to read, so I was apprehensive if I would even enjoy this book let alone be able to finish it. However, I did like this book and finished it within 2 days time.

What was interesting about this book was exploring Asperger's Autism, which is something that I know very little about. It was a great deal of fun to take someone who does not understand emotions like love and place them into a situation where love or falling in love was the end result. The need for precise scheduling seemed to surprise me too, especially with the need to calculate every minute of time done to how long it should take to shop for something as simple as a scarf.

The other thing that I enjoyed was Don's need to create "projects" to accomplish goals. At first it was to find a suitable wife, so he initiated "The Wife Project". Then the goal of helping Rosie find the identity of her father, so "The Father Projected" was created. Lastly, there was "The Rosie Project", which was the main plot of the book. Since I have some science background, I felt that Simsion did a great job at showing this logical part of the scientific brain and how it relates to every day life.

I know that others felt that Simsion made his main character Don a little like Sheldon from the "Big Bang Theory", but even with the similarities there were enough differences that made Don incredibly unique. His inability to meet someone without calculating their BMI was truly humorous to me. I enjoyed the situations that he found himself in with respect to "normal" social decorum like the dispute with a student on evolution that involved a flounder well past its eat by date.

For me, there weren't too many things that I did not like about the book. It had a good flow to it and was a very easy, light read. The fact that it is only told through Don's eyes is why the book was successful for me. If there had been more with respect to the thoughts and feelings of Gene, Claudia, and Rosie I don't think the underlying meaning behind writing the book would have been as strong. However, I really wanted more from the Gene and Claudia storyline. I suppose more for my own curiosity than anything else. There was an unexpressed feeling that Claudia was not as excited about the open marriage the same way that Gene made it sound. Especially after the scene where she put chili peppers in his sandwich without telling him!

Overall, this book was enjoyable and quite different from what I would typically read. If you like romantic comedies then I think that you would enjoy this book. However, if you are not into that type of thing and would not be able to get past the similarities between Sheldon and Don, then you probably should skip this book.

Rating: 4 out of 5

I borrowed this book from my local library; I was not asked to do a review of this book.

The image was taken from Good Reads.