The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion

The Rosie EffectNarrated by Dan O’Grady

A sequel to the wonderful, unique, and quirky The Rosie Project book/audio from 2013, The Rosie Effect features Don Tillman and Rosie Jarman again, now married and living in New York and unexpectedly expecting. Just as in The Rosie Project, the story is told in first person POV by Don, who is extremely logical and entirely socially oblivious*. Rosie is now pursuing her medical degree, and Don is a visiting professor in the Columbia Medical School.

Don’s perspective keeps things lively – he knows he loves Rosie, but it hasn’t occurred to him that he should say it; he told her once, and it hasn’t changed. He copes with The Baby Project by learning all things baby – from an obstetrics textbook as well as from books like “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”. He decides to keep Rosie organized with nutritional and fitness advice, and sets up a giant spreadsheet on the bathroom wall tiles to keep on-track, complete with diagrams of the baby at each growth stage. But when he takes his friend Gene’s advice too literally – to observe children  – by extensively videotaping them at play in a park, and is arrested as a potential sex offender, things really start to go haywire. For the first time in his life, he struggles to keep Rosie’s feelings in mind, causing him to start weaving a web of small deceptions to keep her from being stressed by his behavior – and each step gets him further and further enmeshed. Add to that their unconventional living arrangement – tenants of the former rock star who lives upstairs and plays the drums at all hours of the night, housed with a special beer refrigeration unit that requires constant upkeep – and the reader is kept wondering where the train wreck will occur!

I was laughing out loud within the first minute and a half, and was totally entertained, even through Don’s constant minutiae of all-things-baby. Their Lothario friend Gene from Australia gets kicked out by his wife and joins them in New York – in their apartment – complicating things even more; however, Don shows his growing sense of empathy with Gene and Gene’s son Carl, with his refrigeration repair friend Dave’s business and crumbling marriage, and even with The Lesbian Mothers project, to which he is assigned for Scientific Rigor. All isn’t lightness throughout, however, since his attempts to keep Rosie happy actually create a distance between them that becomes potentially too wide to breach.

Dan O’Grady is superb – simply superb – as narrator for Don. His Don is logical, to-the-point, and brisk but appropriately emotionless, delivering Don’s standard saying “Correct” perfectly as the consummate response to questions delivered by many incredulous characters in the story; I always anticipated it but laughed out loud just the same. He has all the different New York regional accents down pat, with a completely different personality for each person. His female voices are produced less with pitch variation and more with volume, tone and timbre, but are altogether distinct and easy to discern. I think my favorite delivery, other than Don and Rosie, might have been the air marshal – but I’ll let you discover that plot twist on your own. All in all, it was a totally delightful audio experience!

*Some reviewers compare Don to Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory, but I consider him more like Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal in the British TV series Sherlock: Off-the-charts brilliant but completely socially oblivious (and yet sexy). Since Don is a genetics researcher/professor who studies autism, of course, there are parallels to Asperger’s too, but he doesn’t self-diagnose.

 

Melinda


Narration: A

Book Content: B

Steam Factor: You can listen out loud

Violence: Minimal – Don’s a martial arts master who occasionally gets challenged

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

 

 

 

The Rosie Effect was provided to AudioGals by Simon & Schuster Audio for review.