But somehow Graeme manages to make everything look and feel totally new. They even find themselves in some of the same kinds of situations. It’s got a lot of the same characters, and of course they have the same foibles as they did in the first book. The Rosie Effect, the second book, shows that Graeme isn’t a one-trick pony. That puts him in a difficult position, and Graeme puts you right there with him. He sees the world in terms of logic, but he feels just as deeply about that world as everybody else. What Don allows readers to appreciate is that, just because somebody might not be highly literate in the language of emotions doesn’t mean he doesn’t have emotions, and powerful ones at that. But if you need to secretly collect DNA samples from 117 people at a party, there’s nobody in the world who’s going to do a better job.
True, Don may not be the best at picking up on subtle social cues. But through Don Tillman, the hero of both books, Graeme casts the issue in a different light. We may not even consciously realize we’re doing it.
Usually, when we meet people who are different from us, in whatever way, we tend to treat them as inferior, even though we say that’s not what we’re doing. I was happy to learn that one of my favorite things about both books is also one of Graeme’s favorite things. As soon as we heard about it, Melinda and I asked him for an advance copy, and we enjoyed it so much that we invited Graeme to come to Seattle to talk to us about it. Graeme has been busy too, writing a sequel called The Rosie Effect. Since then, I must have given The Rosie Project to at least 50 friends. Ultimately the book is less about genetics or thinking too logically or the main character’s hilarious journey than it is about getting inside the mind and heart of someone a lot of people see as odd-and discovering that he isn’t really that different from anybody else. It starts when a geneticist who may or may not have Asperger’s Syndrome decides to put together a double-sided, 16-page questionnaire as the obvious first step to finding a wife. Melinda and I loved his first book, The Rosie Project. If somebody asked me, “what do you think your decades of working in technology have prepared you for?” my first answer definitely wouldn’t be, “writing a best-selling novel that beautifully explores the human condition.” But Australian author Graeme Simsion has taken his extensive experience in the data modeling industry and used it to do just that.
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