K-SCORE: 86
Author: Graeme Simsion
Spoiler Level: Moderate
The Rosie Project is heartwarming. I laughed out loud, I nearly cried, and every step of the way I wanted the best outcomes for the obsessively analytical, socially perplexed, geneticist Don Tillman and the frustrated feminist, openly adventurous, psychology student Rosie Garman on their quest to scientifically unveil Don’s optimal life partner and Rosie’s biological father. It’s an extremely fast read, filled with complex characters, lovingly exploring relationships and social conventions with insightful depth. The plots round out, the characters (even the minor ones) develop, the stakes get elevated, the revelations around the climax are powerful and well-earned, and though the themes that it explores - social ineptitude, ostracism, genetic predispositions to being different, fidelity, the pitfalls of obsessive behavior, being laughed at, feeling like you don’t belong - are extremely complex and difficult, the net result is a story that is a simple kind of happy.
“made me feel a little less alone in this world”
I perhaps find Don more relatable than most, given that I’m predisposed to analyzing everything and have become obsessive with my time usage, but I have a great deal more emotional awareness than he does. Seeing the world over his shoulders is refreshing. The way he breaks down possibilities for things, trying to see every outcome, noticing when they are all somehow negative, made me feel a little less alone in this world. I recognized the flaw with his Wife Project right away of course, but appreciated the logic and humor behind it regardless. Reading about him acting on his emotional connection to Rosie and coming up with logical justifications for his actions is endlessly amusing. My biggest concern was that he would be changed too much at the end, trying to adapt to Rosie and losing the uniqueness of how he looked at life. Yet Graeme Simsion sidestepped that issue expertly and so I love where the book ends up.
The book is in the first person from Don’s perspective so it’s a tough challenge to get Rosie’s perspective, but Simsion does this extremely well too. She has a few vital moments of her standing up for herself (calling Gene a pig, bashing The Wife Project, etc.) and a few vital moments of her standing up for Don (recognizing his selflessness with The Father Project, defending him when people laugh at the dance, treating him extremely well in New York) that made me love her as much as I loved Don, and once you have those two pieces in place, the rest is easy. Just give them trials together and let them communicate well by the end.
The Rosie Project has a couple small faults that in no way detract from the joy of reading it, but are probably worth mentioning.
It is written like it wants to be a movie. It wants to be a romantic comedy starring Cary Grant if he hadn’t aged ever. The chapters are perfectly scene length it has a distinctly rom-com arc. There are even all kinds of cliche moments of rom-com stories throughout like the weird first date, the embarrassing formal dance, the invitation after a date to “come up” and the awkwardness of that moment, the almost montage-esque good-times tour of New York City, the boxing match/important discussion between relative strangers that I don’t think has ever actually happened, and the fancy dinner date with tableside proposals and public fights. At the end there’s even a moment where Don says his life has “become a romantic comedy” and it’s one of my least favorite passages in the whole book. One of the great things about books is that you don’t need to think filmic when you’re writing. I didn’t need Rosie and Don’s relationship to be applauded by strangers at any point. They could have had their culminating moment in a genetics lab or how about that balcony that Rosie taught Don to use? Let them be longer moments, shorter moments if need be, quiet moments. I suppose the majority of the creativity went into crafting the characters and their personal conflicts, so I should go easy on a writer who just needed an excuse to put them in the same place at the same time at the right point on his narrative arc.
The Father Project would have been a story better told from Rosie’s perspective. We know why Don cares immediately. He’s drawn to Rosie for some reason and wants to spend more time with her. Rosie has complex feelings regarding her father figures and the death of her mother that Don tries to understand, but he barely can recognize when he’s in love, so he isn’t really capable of anything besides trying to help Rosie out. Which is fine, except that it means that all the revelations regarding The Father Project pale in comparison to what’s going on with The Wife Project / The Rosie Project. So as the details of that story are mteased out to the end of it all, it feels like it’s getting in the way. It might have been a better idea to end the story of The Father Project in a way that conflicts with The Rosie Project, which is even set up well and addressed because Don has loyalties to his few friends, old secrets of the deceased, and professional ethics. It’s fine though. It’s a vehicle for story progress far more often than it’s an obstacle.
Lastly, Simsion isn’t that great at describing things. Partly this is funny because Don insists on identifying people by their approximate age and BMI and nothing else, but sometimes it can be a little sad because as a reader you so badly want to see in your mind’s eye some of these people and places. For all the magic of that New York tour, I couldn’t visualize much of it at all, even when Don scaled down a wall from four stories up. Likewise I couldn’t visualize the genetics lab and only barely could I appreciate the bleakness of Don’s undecorated, hyper-organized, spotlessly clean apartment. Don calls Rosie “the most beautiful women in the world” a few times, and I wished I could see her, but Don has no gifts for poetic language. It’s a byproduct of the format mostly, but there were definitely tricks Simsion could have used (dialogue, Don developing appreciation for some things) that would have circumvented the problem at least a little bit.
In essence though, The Rosie Project is romantic and funny and it’s rarely funny to talk about why something is funny and rarely romantic to talk about why something is romantic, so my review will never be worth a hundredth the as much as just reading the book. The story of Don Tillman finding a person who loves him when he lives in fear that he’s wired wrong, that he doesn’t have a place even among other scientists and analytical people, is one that is wonderfully entertaining, spectacularly thoughtful, and gives me hope.