#36 [2019/CBR11] "The Rosie Project" by Graeme Simsion

I'd first heard of The Rosie Project (2013) quite a while ago but only recently picked it up to read. It is a pretty light, romantic comedy involving Don Tillman and Rosie Jarman. Don Tillman is on the autism spectrum. He's very smart and methodical but also very awkward in social situations. Don has been successful in many areas of his life and is a tenured professor at a university in Australia. However, always awkward and misunderstanding, he's never been lucky in love. But wanting love and a family like so many others, Don decides that he needs a partner and devises a perfect plan to find one.

Don creates a questionnaire to assist him with his "wife project." It is very specific and covers everything from education, timeliness, and hygiene to food preferences, health, and even makeup. He follows the advice of his only friends: his womanizing, coworker Gene and Gene's psychologist wife Claudia.

I can't imagine that a woman on a dating site would bother answering such a detailed, kind of offensive, questionnaire before even meeting their prospective date, but, surprisingly, Don gets many responses. Many of them are immediately unsuitable because Don is ridiculously picky.

Before he can make much progress, Rosie shows up in his office. With a nice, meet-cute misunderstanding, Rosie and Don are suddenly going out to dinner together. The dinner is a spectacular failure, but even though Rosie would answer every one of Don's questions incorrectly, there is something about her that goes well with him. She's late, she smokes, she wears makeup. But she also finds Don intelligent and amusing. She pushes him in some ways and understands him in others. She also needs his genetic knowledge in discovering the identity of her real birth father.

Don and Rosie spend a good amount of time together as they go after discovering her real father. They definitely become closer, and Don shows himself to be a very loyal and selfless companion. There are still ups and downs as Don stubbornly sticks to his "wife project" and questionnaire. But this is a romantic comedy, so it all ends well.

I found this book pretty fun and entertaining. Don and his perception of the world were usually pretty funny, and I admired his honesty and integrity. There were definitely parts of the book that didn't seem particularly realistic, but it didn't really matter because I enjoyed what I was reading.