After finally finishing all my assignments; I finally have some time to read! However, this review will be short and sweet as I now have exams to revise for!
Author: Graeme Simsion
Publisher: Penguin
Publication Date: 2nd January 2014
Genre: Humour, Romance
Summary:
Being the world's most socially awkward and weird man makes it extremely hard for you to find your perfect partner. Don Tillman, a successful geneticist and lecturer, however has a plan. Enter The Wife Project; a scientific experiment of find the perfect woman and lifelong partner. Don is determined that this method is guaranteed to produce the answer to all his dreams. However, when Rosie unsuspectingly walks into his life; she turns his world upside down.
Review:
I am not going to lie, I brought this book because I thought the cover was interesting and I had heard a lot about it online.
Big mistake.Even though the plot was a really interesting and original idea; I felt that Don was a bit too like Sheldon Cooper (from The Big Bang Theory). I am a big fan of the show and this aspect really ruined it for me as, in my opinion, it made Don, who would have otherwise been a really interesting character, boring and unoriginal. In the end, he just got on my nerves...
However, I thought his quirky and complicated relationship with Rosie was really cute and made me continue reading as I really, really, really wanted to find out what happened. Rosie, I think, was the redeeming factor of the book and story. She was interesting, well developed and the complete binary opposite of Don.
On the cover of the book, it has quote from the Mail on Sunday describing the book as 'a laugh-out-loud debut.' Hardly. I grant that the book did have it's funny moments which were, in my opinion, sparingly placed in the plot, but I barely even smiled at most of them. I think the book's main problem is that Simsion is trying too hard to be funny. This, in turn, makes the humorous moments seem forced and unnatural; something which really puts me off books!
Finally, I might just be being picky but... I did not actually find out where the book was set until about halfway through as not a lot of emphasis was put on the setting and location of the story. This is not a huge problem, but personally I quite like to know where the story is set when I am reading just for a cultural reference...
If you carry on past the Acknowledgements and the Q&A with Graeme Simsion at the end of the book; there are some little extra bits. For example, you can actually take the Wife Project questionnaire and try making some of your own The Rosie Project themed cocktails. I thought these were worth a mention as they are actually quite fun and are a nice little touch.
Review: 6/10. Over-hyped.
You can buy The Rosie Project from Amazon here.
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