However, for some reason, he wishes to spend time with her and the Father Project provides a reason to do so. In retrospect, I think it may have been just Don’s scientific bent which interested him at first in the Father Project but it is not explicit in the book. Don doesn’t need her to fill out the questionnaire to know that she is totally unsuitable. Rosie is not a candidate for the Wife Project because she is smoker, a barmaid, is habitually late, dislikes maths, and is “basically a vegetarian”.

Precisely why Don makes this decision isn’t entirely clear. Don decides to help Rosie identify her father via DNA testing – “the Father Project”. Rosie’s mother had drunken sex with a member of her graduating class some 30 or so years before but the identity of her father is unknown. Around the same time, Don meets Rosie Jarman. He is looking for a highly intelligent, non-smoker, who is never late, good at maths, and is not a vegetarian (and that’s just the start). He does not believe he can feel romantic love, so he proceeds based on compatibility. In his typical style, he decides to create a questionnaire (16 double-sided pages of questions!) to try and identify the perfect woman for him. He is 39 and has decided that he would like a life partner. A change to his schedule throws him into chaos.ĭon is mostly a loner, having only a few friends. The first clue I had was his scheduling of 94 minutes in his evening to clean his bathroom. The book demonstrates this in a myriad of ways, some of them hilarious and some of them more poignant. He is socially inept, most comfortable in strict and rigid routines, and sees things mostly in black and white. He is clearly somewhere on the autism spectrum (possibly Aspberger’s Syndrome) but he has never been diagnosed with that condition and he doesn’t think of himself that way – rather, he believes he is “wired differently”. The book is told entirely from his first person perspective and I always think that such stories translate extremely well to audio. When it came up for review at AudioGals, I put my hand up to continue the patriotic fervor.ĭon Tillman is an associate professor in genetics at a Melbourne university. I heard a lot of buzz about The Rosie Project – it is an Australian book so I heard the local buzz first and now that it has been released in the US, it’s being renewed.

The rosie project book 3