I must have a hankering for quirky romance this year. Don't get too used to it. I must just not have enough books with Orcs in them on my upcoming reading list. :PI picked this one up after encountering someone reading it in a course I took. She had been laughing so hard that I figured that was a good sign for the book.
Now for the book. Picture this: Sheldon Cooper decides he needs a wife. How would he go about it?
Intrigued? Meet Professor Don Tillman - a genetics professor at the University. His life his rigidly scheduled to the point of ridiculousness. But he embarks on a special project - The Wife Project - so he won't be subjected to a lifetime of loneliness. Using his tendency toward analyzing - he designs a questionnaire to find a suitable mate and begins his search. Through various dating methods - he administered the questionnaire and was continually disappointed that his perfect match was not coming through this. Finally, his friend Gene offers to filter the questionnaires and send him the candidates that are most suitable.
And then Rosie comes to his door - sent by Gene. Don immediately assumes that Rosie has been selected by Gene as a suitable candidate, despite all appearances to the contrary. On the surface, Rosie doesn't fit at all - she smokes, she drinks, she isn't at all what he wanted intellectually. And why should she? She never completed the questionnaire. But he can't get her out of his mind. When she suddenly hands him a genetics problem - to discover who her biological father is - he leaps and channels all of the energy he had been putting into The Wife Project into Rosie's Father Project.
The more time they spend together, the more Don wants to see her, but he has convinced himself that it is just the challenge of finding out. Of helping her. Of helping this off-beat, completely unsuitable woman.
You can pretty much guess how it works out - man falls in love, even though she thinks he's incapable of feeling love. He embarks on The Rosie Project to convince her.
This was a really great read and it was a pretty quick read. I loved that it was told in the first person, from Don's perspective. This really showcases the Sheldon Cooper-ness of him. There were parts of the book that were completely laugh-out-loud funny as he makes observations about the normal world from his perspective. I really enjoyed it cover-to-cover. I felt some of the "problems' in the story were pretty obvious but I liked how Simsion worked through them. I can't believe it is his first novel and I look forward to following this author as he puts out future books.
Highly recommended.
