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

by Graeme Simsion

[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.