I knew I had to get my hands on a copy of The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion after discussing it with the wonderful Marketing Assistants at HarperCollins Canada. They spoke very highly of this book and I could tell by their smiles that they were genuinely in love with it. I purchased it the following day and finished within twenty-four hours. Think of the best Chick-Lit you’ve ever read being told by Dr.Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory and you get The Rosie Project.
A first-date dud, socially awkward and overly fond of quick-dry clothes, genetics professor Don Tillman has given up on love, until a chance encounter gives him an idea.
He will design a questionnaire—a sixteen-page, scientifically researched questionnaire—to uncover the perfect partner. She will most definitely not be a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker or a late-arriver. Rosie is all these things. She is also fiery and intelligent, strangely beguiling, and looking for her biological father a search that a DNA expert might just be able to help her with.
The Rosie Project is a romantic comedy like no other. It is arrestingly endearing and entirely unconventional, and it will make you want to drink cocktails.
I related to Don Tillman on an intense level — his OCD, his social awkwardness, his constant scheduling was too real for words. His “Wife Project” became so much more than he thought it would. At the age of forty Don changes on an immense level, he relaxes, he erases the whiteboard, and he learns how to take a chance every once in a while. All of this because of Rosie — the one woman who likes him for who he is, the very same woman who would never in a million years pass his “Wife Project” questionnaire, ends up saving his life.
Just be open to something different. Let me show you my world for a couple of days. Starting with breakfast.” (Page 223)
I was truly touched by this wonderfully quirky, well-written novel. I completely understand all of the hype that has surrounded it for the past little while. What’s more is that it’s not the type of novel that you can read and simply forget, it gets inside your bones. I smiled, I cried, and allowed myself to get completely lost in Don’s Life Project. I love the idea that you can change at anytime, that all it takes is for one person to show you what you’ve been missing to truly be happy. I love the notion that you CAN have the best of both worlds — being yourself and trying something new.
I told myself that the changes it (The Rosie Project) had produced were worthwhile, even if tonight I failed to achieve the final objective.” (Page 292)
Have you read it yet?? What did you think?!
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