The Rosie Project: Don Tillman 1 (The Rosie Project) (Don Tillman, #1)

by Graeme Simsion

'Marvellous' John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
'Adorable... A gem of a book' Marian Keyes

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion is a story about love, life and lobsters...

Meet Don Tillman.
Don is getting married.
He just doesn't know who to yet.
But he has designed a very detailed questionnaire to help him find the perfect woman.
One thing he already knows, though, is that it's not Rosie.
Absolutely, completely, definitely not.

Telling the story of Rosie and Don, Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project is an international phenomenon, sold in over thirty countries - and counting.

Don Tillman is a socially challenged genetics professor who's decided the time has come to find a wife. His questionnaire is intended to weed out anyone who's unsuitable. The trouble is, Don has rather high standards and doesn't really do flexible so, despite lots of takers - he looks like Gregory Peck - he's not having much success in identifying The One.
When Rosie Jarman comes to his office, Don assumes it's to apply for the Wife Project - and duly discounts her on the grounds she smokes, drinks, doesn't eat meat, and is incapable of punctuality. However, Rosie has no interest in becoming Mrs Tillman and is actually there to enlist Don's assistance in a professional capacity: to help her find her biological father.
Sometimes, though, you don't find love: love finds you...

Like The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion is a truly distinctive debut. With the charm of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the romance of David Nicholls' One Day, it's both funny and endearing - and is set to become the feel-good novel of 2013...

Graeme Simsion is a full-time writer. Previously an IT consultant and educator, he wrote his first book in 1994 (the standard reference on data modelling, now entering its fourth edition), and is married to Anne, a professor of psychiatry who writes erotic fiction. They have two children.

• ISBN10: 0718178122
• ISBN13: 9780718178123
• Publish Date: 11 April 2013 (first published 30 January 2013)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 19 December 2013
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Michael Joseph Ltd
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

Don Tillman is a highly successful Professor of Genetics, but he is also a very socially awkward single man that believes the solution to all his problems is a wife. He embarks upon a search to find this wife; The Wife Project is a carefully designed questionnaire to find the perfect match for him. In comes Rosie, not a match, but Don finds himself helping her on search for her biological father.

Chick lit always seems to have a quirky woman looking for love, because apparently the message is that strong independent women are incomplete until they have a partner. That is probably a rant for another day but I have to wonder why Nick Hornsby and Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project does not fit into this genre? All the same characteristics are there, the only thing different is the role reversal. My wife jokingly calls the genre dick lit but I don’t know why there is a gender bias in a genre. I thought Seating Arrangements would be considered chick lit but because it had a male protagonist people dismiss it as something different. Not really important but I thought it odd that just because the main character is the wrong gender it doesn’t fall under the same category, which is one of the many problems with trying to categorise books into genres.

Now let’s get back to The Rosie Project; this was an entertaining and quick read that just has too many problems with it. This over hyped book’s major flaw is the portrayal of Asperger’s; much like Addition, a mental health issue (or in this case a pervasive developmental disorder) is the quirky personality. Because underplaying a mental health issue is the answer to making a character quirky; why can’t people just be quirky without having to point fingers? Misrepresenting mental health seems to be the go to move for writers of books, TV and movies and it really isn’t helping people understand these issues. Also while I’m on the topic, why does socially awkward, introverted or quirky have to be considered as problems, why can’t we just be happy for people to be different without having to stick a label on it?

The other major issue I had with The Rosie Project was its predictability; you knew exactly what was going to happen from chapter to chapter and how the book would end. There were no surprises, nothing interesting, just a generic plot. So we have an unpredictable, generic and stereotypical plot; does that leave you with any good points? Not really, just that it was entertaining and there was some decent comedy but in the end I was glad to be done with the book. Remember that old Jack Nicholson movie As Good As It Gets? I have to wonder if this is just a modernisation of that movie, there were so many similarities. I also found a lot of similarities to Addition so I’m not sure if there is anything original left in this book.

For those that don’t mind something so formulaic and predictable, this book is entertaining and you don’t really need to pay attention. I ended up skim reading most of this book and I still felt like I didn’t miss anything, because I guessed what would happen before I read it. I know this book has gotten a lot of buzz lately and I’m still that bitter and cynical old man but I really don’t get it; I don’t see what was so appealing.

Good on Graeme Simsion for taking the world by storm with this novel, the buzz in Australia has started to die down but now the hype is starting around the world. I see it was one of the books been heavily advertised at BEA from Australia (the other being Burial Rites). For that I’m glad it’s doing well, it is nice to see Australian books getting talked about all around the world. Much like The Book Thief, I don’t see why there is so much buzz but I’m still happy when an Australian author reaches the international stage. I’m sure there will be a romantic comedy coming from Hollywood soon, so maybe that is a good reason to read The Rosie Project.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/06/11/book-review-the-rosie-project/

[Leah]

As soon as I heard about Graeme Simsion’s debut novel The Rosie Project, I couldn’t wait to read it. It’s not your normal Chick Lit fayre, but it is a novel Chick Lit fans can appreciate. I loved the cover featuring the lobster, I loved the sound of the novel, and I loved that Don Tillman sounded like a book version of Sheldon Cooper. (If you don’t know Sheldon Cooper, then you need to rectify that immediately, he is my favourite fictional TV show character, EVER and he’s AMAZING.) I went into the book with very high expectations, it’s a novel that’s knocked the socks off everyone that’s read it, with a wide variety of reviews from magazines and publishers around the world, and let me tell you, it did not disappoint.

Don Tillman has a pretty good life. He lives his life by routine, and even has a weekly meal planner so that he ALWAYS knows what he’s going to be eating. He’s decided the only thing missing from his life is a wife. So he devises the Wife Project, a questionnaire for potential wives to fill in that will find Don his perfect match and weed out anyone not suitable. When Rosie Jarman rocks up to his office one day, she’s everything Don doesn’t want. She smokes, she’s always late, she’s a vegatarian, but Rosie doesn’t want to be his wife. Rosie wants his help in finding her biological father. As Don and Rosie begin to work together on the Father Project, Don finds his perfectly ordered life spiralling slightly out of control, but it can’t be because of Rosie, can it? After all, she’s definitely NOT wife material…

I absolutely adored The Rosie Project. I adored Don Tillman, I loved that he lived his life in a somewhat regimented manner. If I could get away with being an anti-social so-and-so and be a bit like a Don Tillman or a Sheldon Cooper I would. I like that characters like Don and Sheldon are fuelled by logic, and not generally by emotions, and they do seem to have a touch of Asperger’s. I liked how Rosie just came barrelling into Don’s life and turned it upside down (sort of, I suppose, how Penny does that on a regular basis to Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory). As soon as I first saw Rosie, I was thrilled. She made the book explode in a riot of colour and light and warmth. She allowed us to see more of Don, she made him less rigid in his ways, and she just made the book go up another level. The plot was amazing, and I lapped the book up, I devoured it, basically.

I can totally understand why everyone is excited about The Rosie Project, it’s something different to the norm. It’s definitely a novel I’m not used to reading, but I adored it. 2013 has been a revelation for me in terms of reading books I wouldn’t normally read and The Rosie Project is the best of the lot. It’s frigging amazing. It let me leave the normal world for a while and enter into Don and Rosie’s world, and it was an amazing ride from start to finish. It was warm, witty, touching… all kinds of fabulous adjectives I could use to describe it. My favourite part of the novel was definitely the part where Don learns to make cocktails all in a matter of days, before going on to do it for real. That was an amazing scene, closely followed by Don and Rosie’s dancing performance. It’s a novel that shows there’s someone for everyone (something I question on a daily basis). Read it, you won’t regret it because it’s amazing.