I just read The Rosie Project!

Diyana Ibrahim
4 min readJan 26, 2022

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PSA: Spoilers included!

The Rosie Project was narrated by an OCD genetics professor named Don Tillman. Written in the first point of view, he successfully made me feel like a different person (only for a short period of time) after I finished reading the book. I started to question the cleanliness of the things I touch, the food I ate or even the clothes I wear.

The book starts with Don coming to his senses that he was not getting younger and therefore is in NEED of a female partner. With the aid of his ONLY FRIEND, Gene, together, they came up with the idea of The Wife Project where a group of women needs to fulfill the requirements prepared in the questionnaire by Don Tillman himself.

The Wife Project

He set up a specific date for people to come and answer his questionnaire. Don even made the effort of putting up flyers around the campus to announce the eventful night of women trying to fulfill his wants.

However, the night turned out to be a resentful one as most of the women don’t even manage to even fulfill half of his requirements (most of them smoke, and do not practice a healthy lifestyle).

Despite experiencing a catastrophic night that resembled failure for The Wife Project, Don remained positive and by fate met a woman named Rosie.

The Rosie

She is actually a psychology student in campus who suddenly entered his office one fateful day (Gene’s recommendations) who originally wanted an answer to a genetics question. But Don misunderstood the situation, suddenly asked her out for dinner. Don thought that Gene was suggesting that Rosie was the girl who had high probability of meeting most of the requirements presented in The Wife Project questionnaire.

All rom-com related scenes aside, Don’s initial Wife Project suddenly turned into The Father Project, aiming to use his knowledge as a genetics professor to its fullest capability in order to help Rosie in finding her biological father. Don and Rosie experienced various endeavours and unexpected rendezvous, and most importantly solved them TOGETHER. They even went to New York, became bartenders just to swap some sample to be tested in the lab, to find Rosie’s father.

Finally, as the book’s title suggest, Don obviously gets the girl despite all the awful things that got in the way. Mostly, the conflicts were all based on Don’s out-of-the-norm personality. He makes the subject of falling in love so objective that it made Rosie felt like an object that needed solid, concrete reasons to be fell for in the first place.

Don showed obvious signs of incapability to give out love and to be loved. Though, as the narrator, he constantly persisted that his lack of fatherly love growing up had never affected him in any way, I do personally believe that his genuine sense of optimism had made him feel this way.

The Analysis and Review

The author, Graeme Simsion is a great writer in a lot of ways.

1. The narration

Don speaks in a unique way (like throwing scientific terms even when interacting with people who has minimal scientific knowledge). I found that it take me less time to understand Don’s point of view despite not having those disorders myself. I emphatize with the character even if it is so frustrating that his ways made things so complicated.

2. Rosie’s Character

She is super disagreeable, but is very compassionate. She was also hard to deal with. But with Don, they just fit perfectly. I want to see how she managed to co-exist with Don and how they navigate through their relationship.

All in all, I look forward to finish up the trilogy, and based on the book covers, I know that Don is going to be a father. But it’s okay, in all honesty, I’m more inclined to see (as all readers are always rooting for their favourite character) how Don’s character is developed in the next two phases of his life; dating and fatherhood.

My Reflection

Graeme made me see OCDs not only as a state of mind but also as a lifetime shaped personality that needed tolerance instead of isolation. It is not a weird thing (as commonly portrayed in the media when I grew up) but a form of self-protection which is probably caused by any form of childhood trauma (Don’s case). I learned that a person’s background really needed to be understood before any judgment can be placed upon a fictional character.

If you read this book (or the whole trilogy), and wanted to discuss some elements on the book, feel free to leave a response!

Thank you for reading and have a great day! (or night; whatever applies to when you’re reading this)

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Diyana Ibrahim
Diyana Ibrahim

Written by Diyana Ibrahim

Provides you with daily 5 minute reads to work about books, science and Vancouver.

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