Welcome to the official fall season! Please continue to read on and enjoy my reviews for my October reads.
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
Set in Melbourne, Australia and New York City, The Rosie Project explores the romantic and comedic errors of Don Tillson, a man with undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome. As a professor of genetics, 36 year-old Don lives an orderly, predictable life in a protected academic setting. Trouble ensues when Don becomes ready to find a life partner and he embarks upon his creation of The Wife Project.
Synopsis: The misfit and misunderstood Don Tillman has only had three friends his entire life. So he decides it’s time to find the ultimate friend and get married. Titled The Wife Project, Don develops a stringent and detailed 16-page questionnaire to identify a select pool of perfect candidates from which he can choose a partner.
Rosie Jarman enters the picture when Don mistakes her for a Wife Project applicant. A graduate student in psychology, Rosie is completely unsuitable – and intrigues Don from their first moment together.
The Rosie Project is a novel with terrific pace and sharp dialogue. It fits the bill for a fun weekend reading diversion.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a work of historical fiction by Taylor Jenkins Reid. It follows Monique, a journalist struggling to make a name for herself, after receiving an offer to interview the mysterious and reclusive 1960s Hollywood starlet Evelyn Hugo about fame, scandal, and love.
The novel is framed as a biography but reads as if thrown together by an employee of a gossip rag, who included all of the salacious parts of Evelyn’s famous life and the cost of fame, but none of her interiority.
I had high hopes, as I have enjoyed Taylor Jenkins Reid’s other writings. However, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is sloppy and filled with mindless and overly dramatic pros. It’s a book that “entertains, but never challenges” and does not rise to the high ratings it received.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Middlesex the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides is on Goodread’s list of books to read in a lifetime. It sat on my “to read” list for numerous years, and I finally tackled it this month. Middlesex is a fictional, family saga about Calliope Stephanides, who some call the most famous hermaphrodite in literature, and how she was reborn again as Cal Stephanides. Like his other book The Virgin Suicides, you can always count on author Jeffrey Eugenides to tackle a controversial subject in the most elegant way.
Synopsis: Middlesex chronicles three generations of a Greek family and the life of narrator and protagonist Calliope/Cal Stephanides, an intersex man, raised as a girl, with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. The first half of the novel beautifully details Calliope’s grandparents migration from Asia Minor and their assimilation into the United States. The second half is set in the 20th Century and is a social commentary about Cal’s realization and coming to terms with who he is.