The Rosie Project

  by Graeme Simsion

Simon & Schuster 2013

295 pages     Fiction

Think Sheldon Cooper and the Big Bang Theory. This first novel by Aussie Graeme Simsion is a total winner. I loved every minute of it.

Don Tillman is a geneticist and a university professor, and he is definitely on the Autism spectrum. His best, and only, friends are Claudia and Gene—Gene being another professor and a terrible philanderer. Claudia is a psychologist and understands Don and his foibles. Don is an extremely appealing character with a developmental disorder but the same needs as everyone else. The only problem is that he doesn't know what he needs. His life is totally ordered, from the meals that he eats to the number of steps he takes every day. He has trouble being touched, and is not sure when he has made a joke. He learns everything he thinks he needs to know from books or websites—including learning how to dance and have sex.

When Don decides he needs a wife, he treats the issue like the researcher he is—he develops a questionnaire, a highly personalized psychometric questionnaire. He distributes his questionnaire to a variety of sources, but he is having trouble finding anyone who meets his specific needs. Then his friend Gene sends Rosie to meet him. Rosie is the exact opposite of what Don thinks he is seeking. She is messy, late, scattered, but Don begins to feel things he can't understand. She interrupts his ordered life.

 On the other hand, Rosie needs Don's expertise. She has never known who her father is, but as a geneticist, Don can help her. Together, they devise a plan to get DNA from a variety of men, all of whom were in her dead mother's medical school graduating class, one of whom Rosie thinks must be her father. This subplot stretches throughout the entire book. Their adventures gathering DNA evidence are very funny. Of course, like all romantic comedies, the book ends well, and Don and Rosie live happily ever after.

The reviewer in the New York Times said, “'The Rosie Project' is the kind of Panglossian comedy in which everything is foreordained to work out for the best. That’s not a genre that can be dismissed entirely — at least not without sacrificing P. G. Wodehouse, which no one should be prepared to do — but it’s one that doesn’t comfortably accommodate things like autism spectrum disorders."

The Rosie Project is a quick, delightful read. Reader's compare it with Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, but I believe that Mark Haddon's book takes a deeper look into life on the autism spectrum. There is a follow up book to The Rosie Project called The Rosie Effect in which the relationship between Don and Rosie moves to the next level.   

When I finished reading it, I gave it to my step-daughter who read it in one sitting on a plane ride. It's that kind of book. This posting about The Rosie Project is brief because I gave the book away before I wrote the review. It was our October book for book club, and everyone really enjoyed reading it.

The Kitchen Daughter

By Jael McHenry


New York, Gallery Books, 2011

272 pages, Fiction

The Kitchen Daughter is the first published novel by Jael McHenry, and it appeared in bookstores earlier this month. This is a novel about cooking, family, and Asperger’s Syndrome. But more than that, the book explores the differing ways in which individuals cope with grief and loss.

Ginny and her sister Amanda have just lost their parents in an unfortunate accident. Amanda, a young mother of two little girls, lives about a half hour away from the family home. Ginny, her sister lives in the house where she was born in Philadelphia and has never strayed far from home. Although it is undiagnosed, she suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome and doesn’t relate well to those she doesn’t know well. Ginny does relate well to food, and over the years, she has become the family cook and the keeper of the family recipes. She also thinks in terms of food—her sister has an “orange juice voice,” for example, and whenever Ginny is particularly agitated or upset and needs to calm herself, she thinks of recipes and cooks them in her mind.

The book is as much about Amanda as it is about Ginny. The cataclysmic event that caused their parents’ death weighs heavily on Amanda. She feels that she must become the caretaker of her sister, and in her extreme grief, she comes across as overbearing and domineering, which is greatly resented by Ginny, who is suffering in her own way and believes that Amanda is intruding on her sheltered life. While she understands intellectually that her life is going to have to change, she cannot express in words what those changes should look like. So she cooks.

In describing Ginny, Jael McHenry says: “I wanted to write a character who was passionate about cooking but had never used it to connect with people—I feel like food plays this great role in connecting people, especially family, and a character who cooks just for the process of cooking and not for the end result was really intriguing to me.” As Ginny cooks family recipes, she conjures up the memory of the family cook who made that particular recipe. The memory appears to be strong enough that the ghost of the cook appears as the smell of the food fills the kitchen.

Recipes are shared throughout the book. One interesting aspect is that a family recipe for Ribollita, a bread soup, both begins and ends the book. The recipe at the beginning of the book is Ginny’s grandmother’s recipe, and when Ginny makes it, the ghost of Nonna appears to her. At the end of the book the recipe for Ribollita is Ginny’s own, symbolizing that she is finally coming into her own and taking charge of her own life. As Publisher’s Weekly notes, "The Kitchen Daughter is “an intelligent and moving account of an intriguing heroine's belated battle to find herself.”

More than anything else, this is a book about grief and loss and the differing ways in which individuals cope with that loss. Having lost my mother a few months ago, I related well to that aspect of the book. My sister and I recently had a dinner party for our children to celebrate our mother’s food and our mother’s life. We made pasties, a Cornish meat pie, and one of my mother’s signature dishes. The women in the family chopped the meat, potatoes, rutabagas, carrots, and onions (along with broccoli and cheese for the vegetarians in the crowd). Instead of making pie crust, we used the refrigerated version (please Mother, forgive us!). Then, we let each of the 20+ guests make and bake his/her own pasty. Even the three-year-old great granddaughter was able to put her own pasty together. As my nine-year-old granddaughter was making her pasty, she looked up at me with shining eyes and said, “Oh, Grandma! Let’s do this every year.” And just like that, my mother was there in the room with us.

The Kitchen Daughter appeared on bookshelves last week; I received my copy from the publisher. I can envision a book club reading the book and either making the recipes in the book, or better yet, have each book club member bring a cherished family recipe to share at the book club meeting.

Jael McHenry’s website: http://www.jaelmchenry.com/

Her cooking blog: http://www.simmerblog.typepad.com/

The book’s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/thekitchendaughter

An interesting interview with Jael about the process of getting a book published: http://elisabethweed.blogspot.com/2011/02/power-of-perseverance-interview-with.html