A blog mostly about books, but often about movies, music, television, sometimes religion, and yes, occasionally, breakfast.
01 January 2015
Review: The Rosie Effect
The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Closer to a 2.5.
Some things are best left unsullied. The Rosie Project was a super-cute, enjoyable read that tackled a variety of different issues without being condescending or immediately problematic. It was a nice fictional piece of candy, and I thought it sorted out well. Why mess with a great thing, right?
This is not a necessary sequel, and it's not especially good, either. The core of the story is that, after about 10 months of marriage, Rosie is pregnant. Unexpected for Don, schemed by Rosie. The book is now, instead of Don coping with how to find a mate, it's how to figure out how to be a father.
As a newish parent myself, I can relate to this in parts. It's not that I'm mildly autistic, but there isn't a manual for this sort of thing. The situations Don ends up getting into, however, are on the unrealistic side of the measure, with a lot of bizarre occurrences almost for the sake of being bizarre.
The biggest crime, though, might be the ruining of Rosie. While I'm not giving anything away with how she gets to her pregnancy given the topic, her actions after that are not in the same vein of what we came to understand from the first book. She becomes almost unlikable, which is really not the point.
This is supposed to be a wacky, light read, but it just ends up feeling depressing and unfortunate. My expectations were high, yes, but this didn't even come close to meeting them or anything close to them. Just an unfortunate state of affairs, and one I wish didn't exist to bring down the reputation of its enjoyable predecessor.
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