This is the sequel to The Rosie Project. Now Don and Rosie are married, living in New Year, and pregnant. Don has many unusual ways to learn about pregnancy and how he'll be as a father. Unfortunately he and Rosie are not communicating well with each other and havoc ensues. I love this couple! Don is so literal about everything and Rosie does not want to hear it. She's studying and working on her thesis and does not want to be distracted. Don wants to make sure Rosie is not stressed so he keeps secrets which he has not done before. It blows up in Don's face and he almost loses all that is important to him. There are the returning characters--Gene, Claudia, and their children. There are new characters--Sonia, Dave, George, the 3 B's, Lydia, and others--that Don has to learn to work with or around. I had to laugh as Don plows right through. I'm going to miss these characters. Don and Rosie were fun!

Don sets about learning the protocols of becoming a father, but his unusual research style gets him into trouble with the law. Fortunately his best friend Gene is on hand to offer advice: he’s left Claudia and moved in with Don and Rosie.

At first this book had me worried. There were problems presented that seemed insurmountable, and although I expected the usual disasters caused by Don's unique responses to social situations, the magnitude of one of them in particular, was a bit overwhelming. Also the tension rose and rose and rose in relation to the most crucial problem Don and Rosie faced but the resolution was slipped in in such a way it would have been easy to miss. Fortunately, the lead-up to the resolution was a good one and made it believable.
I was quite a bit more emotional in my response to this one than to the first. While hardly as socially inept as Don, we do have some similarities, and watching him struggle through the problems presented in The Rosie Effect was heartbreaking. I also appreciated, as I had in the first, the fact that Graeme Simsion can, through his skillful writing, demonstrate just how much Don cares about others even though he finds it difficult to relate to them on any emotional level. Well written and enjoyable.

I'm hitting another block when trying to talk about the last few books I've read, because here's another batch of very overdue takes on some good books (and one not).

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The Rosie Project

by Graeme Simsion

This was charming, witty, and had plenty of heart -- even without the romance, which just took it all to another level. It was just plain fun to read.

 

Don Tillman is just a great character -- he's likely someone with Asperger's, if not fully Autistic. Which is mentioned once or twice, and then not brought up again. He's then treated as a stubborn, curious, character with behavior patterns no one can seem to understand, but most people in his life figure out hot to cope with. Sometimes they laugh at him, sometimes they get frustrated or angry. What he's not treated as is someone with anything. He's not treated by his symptoms, he's just treated as this guy. Simsion's treatment of Don reminds me of Abed Nadir, from Community (which is high praise from me).

 

The only complaint I had was that the last chapter wasn't really needed, and maybe would've been best left to the imagination. But, setting that aside, it felt rushed, while the rest of the book was so well done, it just stuck out like a sore thumb.

 

Still, whatever -- one of my favorite books of 2013, and still one of the best RomComs I can remember.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

by Maria Semple 

Do you get seasick? People who don't get seasick have no idea what it's like. It's not just nausea. It's nausea plus losing the will to live.

I should get that embroidered on something.

 

This starts light and breezy, a little strange, a little typical "these crazy (white) suburbanites with too much money"; but you know it's going to get dark eventually -- probably nasty dark, but first it's going to lull you into a false sense of fun. I don't think it gets as dark as it felt like it could've, it didn't need to, and I'm glad it didn't -- but there was a whole lot going on that the whacky beginning didn't indicate.

 

You don't have care about the story because these characters are strength enough to carry your attention for quite awhile with nothing happening -- and Semple's style is just as strong. But there is a sorry here, a story of a daughter discovering just who her mother was -- as is -- a story about a talented woman who ended up loving a life she'd never have expected or picked for herself or her family. So you do care about the story -- especially the way it's told, in bits and pieces, jumping back and forth through time, from multiple perspectives -- particularly when you get two or three perspectives painting a picture of an event -- as Bee digs into her investigation.

 

Fun story, quirky characters, well-told story, with plenty of heart -- and too many quotable lines. I jotted down a few that I can't resist sharing, even in this abbreviated post.

You probably think, U.S./Canada, they're interchangeable because they're both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn't be more mistaken.

Americans are pushy obnoxious, neurotic, crass -- anything and everything -- the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are one of that. . . To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD, John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality.

Really, who wants to admit to her daughter that she was once considered the most promising architect in the country, but now devotes her celebrated genius to maligning the driver in front of her for having Idaho plates?"

The Rosie Effect

by Graeme Simsion

"To the world's most perfect woman." It was lucky my father was not present. Perfect is an absolute that cannot be modified, like unique or pregnant. My love for Rosie was so powerful that it had caused my brain to make a grammatical error.

Don and Rosie are living in New York, getting used to married life, and expecting a kid. None of which goes well -- so, of course, Don tries to tackle things the same way he did in the last book. Instant sequel, just add water.

 

This sequel was written with the same wit and skill as The Rosie Project, but the story wasn't there -- and more importantly, neither was the heart.

 

Mostly, I think, because Rosie wasn't around for a lot -- and when she was there, she wasn't a character, she was an obstacle.

 

Other than really liking the occasional line (maybe more than occasional), I just didn't like how Rosie or Don were written, the plot was shoddy and contrived, and I was just glad to be done with it so I could move on.

Funny Girl

by Nick Hornby

How on earth could he love her? But he did, Or, at least, she made him feel sick, sad, and distracted. Perhaps there was another way of describing that unique and useless combination of feelings, but "love" would have to do for now.

Everything I know about this era of British culture and TV comes from The Hour and An Adventure in Space and Time, so I just have to trust that Hornby did his homework on this. I thought the behind-the-scenes stuff was great, it felt real -- it felt like the kinds of conversations that writers and actors should be having anyway.

 

The love story turned out a lot different than I was sure it would - thankfully. Actually, most of the book did. This wasn't the rags-to-riches-to-wreck story that it seemed like it was going to be, but a story of some people with dreams and talent doing what they could to get going in a cutthroat business. Dreams were chased, many were caught, others changed/grew -- as did the dreamers.

 

In the midst of the discussions about the nature of their show and the stories they told -- both during the making of the show Barbara (and Jim) and in later chapters where it was being looked back at, I kept wondering if tucked away in all that was an apologia for light fiction like Hornby writes? If so, I appreciated it. (it also reminded me of some similar comments John Cleese has made lately, after coming to terms with being someone who makes people laugh, and not saving the world or something grander)

 

Thoughtful, heartfelt, charming -- this is Hornby at his most confident and mature. I can see why some aren't liking it, but it really clicked for me.

Please note this review will have spoilers for book one. If you haven't read book one you may want to skip over this review.

I honestly don't know what to say about this book that i haven't already said in my updates.

I felt like I was reading about totally different characters based on events in book one. We had way too many plot lines. The pace was awful. I blame that on the zig-zag of the plot lines. One thing that Mr. Simison did well in the last book was he really got into great detail about New York. In this book, not so much. And the ending made me laugh. Not in a good way.

The overall plot to The Rosie Effect is that Don and Rosie married only a short time since the end of The Rosie Project are now expecting their first child together. There are also side plots dealing with Don having to clean up a mess he makes which involves him in therapy, hidden identities, a project at the school he is working at, trying to help his friend Dave, trying to help Gene, etc. If this book had just focused on the pregnancy that would have been enough. There was too much going on and most of the plot lines magically resolved themselves due to Don.

Besides the plot lines that ebbed and flowed throughout the book, we have the characters written inconsistently from where they were in the last book.

Case in point. Don was hilarious in the last book. A 40ish man who either has Asperger's or a form of autism, he decided to start The Wife Project (The Rosie Project) and ended up meeting Rosie and in turn started The Father Project in order to help Rosie find her biological father. There were lots of laugh out moments with Don and his comments that he made while talking to people, having his inner dialogue, and his confusion over romantic movies, and his feelings for Rosie. Somehow that is all erased in this sequel since we have Don acting so irrational and just plain dumb during parts of this book it was surreal.


For example, Don moves himself and Rosie out of one apartment in one morning into another place without discussing this with Rosie. The same Don who has to have a schedule for how to do things, on the different ways he knows he can cause Rosie to start to feel amorous enough to make love (they all involve Gregory Peck) decides to move himself into a basement apartment which smells of beer because it is an apartment that houses beer for a rock star that lives above.

Surprisingly Rosie takes this all in stride (I would not have), but flips out when she finds out that Don has told Gene (from the last book) that he could come and live with them in New York for a while (not a spoiler, is in the book summary) after Gene has left Claudia.

Now this is after Rosie has said flat out that she doesn't want Gene to live with them, that she can't stand him, and also they are expecting a baby so they need to actually focus on that. Don still invites Gene because he decides that's what best.

And this is pretty much the entire book. Don does a lot of things, keeps them secret or sometimes not from Rosie, and acts like Batman going around and solving other people's problems but pretty much ignoring the fact he and his wife are coming apart at the seams.

And though I cut Rosie some slack initially (the Gene thing would have made me murder Don) she started behaving so badly that I was done with her as well. She pretty much pushes Don out of being involved at all with her pregnancy and I think I was at 50 percent where I seriously said to myself did I want to finish this book and have it ruin The Rosie Project for me. Rosie was a bit hard to take towards the end of the last book, but I liked her character. She got Don a lot and she said outrageous things but seemed to get him and was in love with him. Apparently the Rosie from the last book switched bodies with another person because now she is nasty and horrible to Don due to the very things she liked about him in the first book.

And we have Gene. Gene who was a philandering piece of crap in the last book who redeemed himself is now in New York due to him returning to form. We get to read more of his horrible wisdom to Don and other's about women, babies, marriage. The only times Gene was not being annoying was when he was sticking up for Don though which was the only time I liked this character. And the way that Mr. Simison decided to just explain Gene's actions made me roll my eyes. I think he thought this would cause readers to like Gene or sympathize with him. Instead I was like who does something like this outside of a bad sitcom?

There are some other characters that I just don't even want to go into but will make an exception for the world's worst social worker who doesn't know Don but acts as if people with Asperger's or autism cannot be trusted to be married or to have children. I hated this character a lot.

And the pace. Wow. The pace dragged and dragged. I think it was because of the plot lines. I could not get a good feel for this book at all. The writing I have to say in a lot of places was just repetitive. I am sure that's because of how Don the character speaks and thinks, but I was tired of him listing out reasons why Rosie or someone could be acting a certain way. Or him explaining how to make drinks, food, wine, etc. It was like reading an instruction manual.

The ending when it came just made me cringe inside. It was so cliche that I was seriously embarrassed. Based on this being called Don Tillman #2 I have a bad feeling a third book is in the works. I plan on leaving that book alone and hoping over time I can forget this book in order to be able to read The Rosie Effect again in the future without this book tainting it.