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Summary
Summary
THE ART OF LOVE IS NEVER A SCIENCE ...
MEET DON TILLMAN, a brilliant yet socially challenged professor of genetics, who's decided it's time he found a wife. And so, in the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers.
Rosie Jarman is all these things. She also is strangely beguiling, fiery, and intelligent. And while Don quickly disqualifies her as a candidate for the Wife Project, as a DNA expert Don is particularly suited to help Rosie on her own quest: identifying her biological father. When an unlikely relationship develops as they collaborate on the Father Project, Don is forced to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie -- and the realization that, despite your best scientific efforts, you don't find love, it finds you.
Arrestingly endearing and entirely unconventional, Graeme Simsion's distinctive debut will resonate with anyone who has ever tenaciously gone after life or love in the face of great challenges. The Rosie Project is a rare find: a book that restores our optimism in the power of human connection.
Author Notes
Graeme Simsion was born in Auckland, New Zealand. His education includes a BSc, GDipC and IS from Monash University, an MBA from Deakin University, a PhD from University of Melbourne, an Advanced Diploma of Screenwriting from RMIT, and a 2014 Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing, RMIT. His Ph.D thesis, Data Modeling: Description or Design, was published in 2006. He is a former IT consultant and the author of two nonfiction books on database design.
He won the 2012 Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award for his book, The Rosie Project, which was published in 2013. It also won the Australian Book Industry's General Fiction Book of the Year for 2014 and the Australian Book Industry's Book of the Year for 2014. The screenplay for this book has been optioned to Sony Pictures Entertainment. In 2014 the sequel, called The Rosie Effect, made the New York Times bestseller list.
His 2016 novel, The Best of Adam Sharp, has been optioned by Vocab Films for a screenplay.
He has written numerous award-winning short stories. His most recent short stories include The Life and Times of Greasy Joe, The Big Issue, Like It Was Yesterday, Review of Australian Fiction, and Intervention on the Number 3 Tram, Melbourne Writers Festival.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
New York Review of Books Review
DON TILLMAN DOESN'T KNOW he has Asperger's syndrome, although his symptoms are obvious to friends and colleagues. He flinches from physical contact and cooks all his meals according to an unvarying schedule; his approach to courtship consists of handing women a detailed questionnaire to test their suitability. It is a convention of romantic comedy that a man's rigidly constrained existence must be disrupted by an impulsive and uninhibited woman, and Graeme Simsion's "Rosie Project," unlike its hero, is resolutely conventional. So along comes Rosie Jarman, "the world's most incompatible woman ... late, vegetarian, disorganized, irrational," with her thick-soled boots and spiky red hair. (An associated convention dictates that this free-spirited heroine must appear to have stepped out of an issue of Sassy from 1994.) Don becomes increasingly involved with Rosie, despite her evident unsuitability for his "Wife Project." (He divides his endeavors into "projects" with capitalized names.) She wants to identify her biological father, and Don, a professor of genetics, offers to help surreptitiously collect and test samples of the candidates' DNA. Forced out of his tightly structured routine by this "Father Project," he finds adventure and, inevitably, love. It's cheering to read about, and root for, a romantic hero with a developmental disorder. "The Rosie Project," Simsion's debut and a best seller in his native Australia, reminds us that people who are neurologically atypical have many of the same concerns as the rest of us: companionship, ethics, alcohol. In fact, Don is a more complex character than he at first appears. What seems to be Asperger's-induced haplessness turns out, at least some of the time, to be a kind of strategic buffoonery. Don's differences are real, but he plays up his eccentricities : he likes to see himself as an independent thinker with too much integrity to make ordinary social and professional compromises. With a light touch, Simsion suggests that Asperger's symptoms can interact, in opaque ways, with human qualities like pride and stubbornness. Don's literal-mindedness can make him an amusing narrator, as when he equably tells us that a date "had chosen a dress with the twin advantages of coolness and overt sexual display." But his insensitivity to the nuances of human speech and behavior sets a limit on the depth of the supporting characters; we see only those traits that are blatant enough to register with Don. (Stronger dialogue would help, as it did in Mark Haddon's "Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.") As the DNA investigation unfolds, Rosie's possible fathers blur into a mass of swabbed coffee cups and stolen toothbrushes. "The Rosie Project" is the kind of Panglossian comedy in which everything is foreordained to work out for the best. That's not a genre that can be dismissed entirely - at least not without sacrificing P. G. Wodehouse, which no one should be prepared to do - but it's one that doesn't comfortably accommodate things like autism spectrum disorders. Halfway through the book, Don describes "the awkwardness, approaching revulsion, that I feel when forced into intimate contact with another human." This would seem to be an obstacle to his and Rosie's happiness - a greater obstacle, perhaps, than her low score on his compatibility questionnaire. Simsion waves the problem away in a post hoc last chapter. The ultimate convention of romantic comedy is that love conquers all, but to propose that it can so easily mitigate such a painful condition may be to take convention too far. GABRIEL ROTH is the author of the novel "The Unknowns."
Bookseller Publisher Review
This funny, feel-good take on Asperger's Syndrome has been getting huge international and local buzz. It's the story of Don Tillman, a 40-year-old professor of genetics at a Melbourne university who looks a little like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockinbird. He also has undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome, which manifests itself in obsessive organisation and amusing social faux pas. Don hasn't had much success in love so he designs a questionnaire to help him find his perfect wife. It's a bunch of quirky questions that just about everyone fails, sometimes in quite hilarious circumstances. When Don hands over the wife project to his best friend Gene he is sent Rosie, who is a total failure on paper but, strangely enough, seems to make Don happy. The subplot involves Rosie's search for her biological father, which sends Rosie and Don on various madcap adventures, including a whirlwind trip to New York. This is the debut novel from Melbourne writer Graeme Simsion, which won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2012. If you're looking for something that has a serious message about Asperger's Syndrome this is not the book. It sets out to be a cute-and-quirky love story and it delivers just that. Melanie Barton is senior category manager at Bookworld.com.au
Guardian Review
The hero of The Rosie Project is one of those rare fictional characters destined to take up residence in the popular consciousness. Don Tillman, Graeme Simsion's geeky, gawky geneticist, seems set to join Adrian Mole and Bridget Jones as a creation with a life beyond the final chapter. The Rosie Project may be a lighthearted romp to be gobbled up in a couple of sittings, but it is also an important book, because Don is on the autistic spectrum. Autistic characters have featured in many works of fiction. The most notable is Christopher Boone, the innocent savant of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, whose immutability is the touchstone for the moral behaviour of all the other characters. But in Don we find, for I believe the first time, a thoroughly comic autistic hero. Some readers may feel, uneasily, that Don is a figure of fun, but for me Simsion pitches the humour perfectly. Yes, we laugh at Don, but we're rooting for him. Don is 39, fit, solvent, intelligent. "Logically, I should be attractive to a wide range of women," he states, but on a series of disastrous dates, logic fails to do its stuff. Finding a wife is like looking for a bone-marrow donor, Don decides. He devises a questionnaire ("Question 35: Do you eat kidneys? Correct answer is c) occasionally") to track down the perfect partner. "I believe I can eliminate most women in less than forty seconds." Enter Rosie, who ticks none of the right boxes. Clearly, to the reader familiar with the romcom format, she's the one, but as Don himself observes: "Humans often fail to see what is close to them and obvious to others." Misunderstandings and slapstick setpieces abound, as when the virginal Don works his way through a manual of sexual positions with the aid of the laboratory skeleton, to the consternation of the dean. How will this unlikely leading man, who shops, eats and socialises according to a rigid set of self-imposed rules, work his way towards happiness with emotional, volatile, utterly unautistic Rosie? Rosie wants to trace her biological father. Don has the know-how and the lab equipment; together they collect DNA samples from a range of suspects. This isn't easy. "The best I had been able to think of was to construct a ring with a spike that would draw blood when we shook hands, but Rosie considered this socially infeasible." I didn't take to moody, self-absorbed Rosie, but I'm not sure we're meant to. Simsion subtly shows how the script Rosie's written for her own life blinkers her just as effectively as does Don's inability to read social cues. Don doesn't regard himself as autistic: he lectures on Asperger's syndrome but fails to link its salient features with his own. "Asperger's isn't a fault. It's a variant. It's potentially a major advantage," he tells his audience; at the heart of The Rosie Project lies the belief that we all behave according to our own "variant", and what passes for normal can cause as many problems as any named condition. Don's friend and colleague, the aptly named Gene, is on a mission to have sex with women of as many nationalities as possible; he marks each conquest with a pin on a world map. "North Korea predictably remained without a pin," records deadpan Don. Don likes Gene's wronged wife Claudia as much as he likes any other human, but at first he accepts his friend's behaviour as part of his professional remit "Sexual attraction is Gene's area of expertise". As Don's involvement with Rosie deepens, and he allows "feelings" to disrupt his "sense of wellbeing", he becomes aware that Gene's "variant", accepted as normal, is in fact corrosive, dysfunctional and yes wrong. With such awareness comes pain. As Don breaks down his boundaries and becomes a player in the game of life, he finds that he can be unprofessional, deceitful a rule-breaker. "I had been corrupted. I was like everyone else," he mourns. Though the comedy never falters, this moral seriousness saves the book from being simple-minded. Simsion is brilliant at getting us to read between Don's literal-minded lines. "I'm not good at understanding what other people want," Don tells Rosie. "Tell me something I don't know," she sighs. "I thought quickly ...Ahhh ... the testicles of drone bees and wasp spiders explode during sex." This good-hearted, pacy, thoroughly enjoyable novel takes a significant step towards showing that all human variants are a potential source of life affirming comedy.
Library Journal Review
Don Tillman-geneticist, rule follower, and habitual BMI estimator-is well aware that his grasp on the nuances of social inter-action is weak at best. His attempts at dating have always ended in disaster. At the age of 39, Don begins the Wife Project, a questionnaire-driven effort that he hopes will filter out all unsuitable candidates and help him find his ideal partner. Enter Rosie Jarman, a woman who wants Don's help on a project of her own: finding her biological father. Don soon determines that the unpredictable Rosie is completely unsuitable as a Wife Project candidate. However, her ongoing presence in his life complicates it enormously, changing his outlook on the behaviors he's always used to get along in a world that finds him difficult to understand. In learning to empathize with Rosie, Don finds that he also has a surprising capacity for love. Narrator Dan O'Grady captures Don's detached and analytical tone while infusing the dialog with genuine warmth and humor as Don and Rosie's screwball romance progresses. Verdict Fans of the Aussie accent will swoon; fans of Simsion's debut will be glad to know there's a sequel in the works.-Anna -Mickelsen, Springfield City Lib., MA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Don Tillman, speed dating... 'I've sequenced the questions for maximum speed of elimination,' I explained to Frances. 'I believe I can eliminate most women in less than forty seconds. Then you can choose the topic of discussion for the remaining time.' 'But then it won't matter,' said Frances. 'I'll have been eliminated.' 'Only as a potential partner. We may still be able to have an interesting discussion.' 'But I'll have been eliminated,' repeated Frances. I nodded. 'Do you smoke?' 'Occasionally,' she said. I put the questionnaire away. Excerpted from The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.