The Rosie Effect

Don Tillman and Rosie Jarman are back. If you were swept away by Graeme Simsion’s international smash hit The Rosie Project, you will love The Rosie Effect.

The Wife Project is complete, and Don and Rosie are happily married and living in New York. But they’re about to face a new challenge.

Rosie is pregnant.

Don sets about learning the protocols of becoming a father, but his unusual research style gets him into trouble with the law. Fortunately his best friend Gene is on hand to offer advice: he’s left Claudia and moved in with Don and Rosie.

As Don tries to schedule time for pregnancy research, getting Gene and Claudia back together, servicing the industrial refrigeration unit that occupies half his apartment, helping Dave the Baseball Fan save his business and staying on the right side of Lydia the social worker, he almost misses the biggest problem of all: he might lose Rosie when she needs him most.

Get ready for The Rosie Effect, the new hilarious and heart-wrenching romantic comedy of the year. 


This book had SO much potential. And I was so, SO disappointed. Part of me wonders if Simsion was encouraged or persuaded to pump out another book really quick in order to keep the momentum off of The Rosie Project (which was a FAR superior novel. You can read my review on that one here).

One of the greatest things about The Rosie Project was that it was able to be funny without being at anyone's expense. It was humour based on sound logic that fails in practicality, and social expectations put under the microscope to realize how silly they are. This book, however, seemed to attempt humour at Don's expense, at parents' expense, and at pregnant mothers' expense. I also found that there was lots of stereotyping of people in specific academic fields in this novel that wasn't in it's predecessor. Overall, for a book that I expected to be as funny as the first, I felt I had only gotten one instance of it that was like the first novel. Otherwise, the humour fell flat. This is a comedic bomb.

Part of the issue with the humour may have stemmed from the fact that this novel was so much more serious than the first. Divorces, break ups, misunderstandings, and estrangements litter the plot line. Honestly sometimes things happened that were so heavy I had a bit of anxiety about them. So with such serious topics, how do you keep the humour going? You can't (or at least Simsion can't), and that was proved with this novel.

It's hard not to be too harsh on this book, but I am just so heartbroken and disappointed. The Rosie Project was easily one of the best books I have ever read, and I was looking forward to this one for so long. The Rosie Effect is really not a bad story if it were to be considered all by itself, but the first novel just set the standard too high. I suppose it was bound to fall that way. 

If one good thing can be said about the novel is that after all of the stuff I just mentioned, it ended well, but I don't think it made up for the wreck of a journey this book was. Personally, I think if you read and loved the first one, don't read this one. Maybe if Simsion writes a third book and it's good, then give this one a chance just in order to keep up with the story, but keep expectations low.