“The Rosie Project” by Graeme Simsion – Love Scientifically

We are being bombarded on a daily basis with various messages which aim to turn love and attraction into a science, with countless advertisements and companies claiming to have the formula that will help you achieve success in that aspect of your life.

However, as is often forgotten, human emotions, and especially the more complex ones such as love tend to be quite resistant to scientific scrutiny.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion is a story which explores that concept, as the plot follows a brilliant genetics professor who is socially-challenged and is seeking the perfect romantic partner. To do so, he puts together an incredibly detailed and precise survey which lasts about sixteen pages.

Against all expectations, he accidentally manages to find the woman who, in theory, is all he could ever dream of. However, as they spend time together, the professor soon realizes that love can never be made into a science, and that it finds you, rather than the other way around.

Simsion’s The Rosie Project is surely an interesting novel, and though the subject matter isn’t entirely to my liking (I’m not the biggest fan of romantic books), I still found the book to be quite enjoyable to read.

The whole point of the book, on the surface at least, is quite easy to identify: a man uses science to seek love, only to be found by it when he least expected it. Love is not something that can be forced on people, nor is it something that can be quantified due to the volatility and utter unpredictability of the human nature.

As far as the story itself goes, though in my opinion there are passages where attention-grabbing elements are missing, on the whole Simsion did a good job at motivating the reader to keep on flipping through the book’s pages. The characters themselves are quite enjoyable, whether thinking on their own and interacting with each other.

I am, of course, referring to Rosie and the professor here; on one hand, we have a free spirited and energetic woman seeking her biological father, and on the other we have a peculiar and intellectual man whose tremendous knowledge hasn’t given him the slightest insight into what love is.

All in all, The Rosie Project is a light, thought-provoking and entertaining read, one I can safely recommend to those who enjoy romantic books and want to learn more about the nature of love itself.

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Graeme Simsion Personal site Graeme Simsion is a New Zealand-born Australian author, screen writer, playwright, and data modeler. In 2012 he was awarded, amongst many others, the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award for The Rosie Project and to this day his writing has managed to garner worldwide attention.

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