Heidi Hart

I had things to do today. I meant to take down the tree and put away our holiday decorations (my wife says it looks like Santa threw up in our living room), do the stacks of laundry that come with having small children and a gastro-intestinally challenged cat, maybe take our boys to the pool now that the outdoor temperatures have finally gotten above zero… and instead, I sat down with this book and my napping son, intending to read for just a minute, and there went the afternoon. 

This is the funniest book I've read in ages, but it's perfectly seasoned with deeper emotion, too: poignancy, bitterness, regret, sympathy, vicarious embarrassment, and a whole lot of sweetness and delight. The hero and narrator, genetics professor Don Tillman, has Asperger's Syndrome, but has so little self insight that even after researching the subject and giving a presentation on Asperger's to a group of young people with that diagnosis, he doesn't recognize himself as a member of their tribe. He recognizes his inability to decipher social cues, but just figures he's wired differently. He lives by his schedule, planning every activity to the second--for example, it takes Don three minutes, twenty seconds to shower, unless he washes his hair, in which case it takes an extra minute and twelve seconds "due to the requirement that the conditioner remain in place for sixty seconds"--and he does not cope well with deviations from his plans. 

Approaching 40, Don has decided he wants a wife, though none of his prior relationships have progressed beyond the first date. He attributes this to a failure to properly screen out unsuitable candidates, and he develops a sixteen page questionnaire

incorporating current best practice to filter out the time wasters, the disorganized, […], the crystal gazers, the horoscope readers, the fashion obsessives, the religious fanatics, the vegans, the sports watchers, the creationists, the smokers, the scientifically illiterate, the homeopaths, leaving, ideally, the perfect partner. 

His two friends (his only two friends) warn him that his standards might be a teensy bit unreasonable, but Don presses on, resulting in several more disastrous first dates. 

When Rosie walks into Don's office, he thinks she is one of the candidates for The Wife Project, and she fails in almost every category--she works at a bar (which he assumes makes her stupid), is perpetually late (time waster), smokes occasionally, doesn't eat meat, wears jewelry and make up and dyes her hair (fashion obsessive)--but it turns out she wants his help as a geneticist, as she is trying to locate her biological father. And of course, as wrong as Rosie is on paper, she's really perfect for Don (if only he were not so blinded by logic). 

Often I don't like stories based on the "big misunderstanding" trope, because the conflict seems artificial where a simple conversation could sort out the confusion, but that's not the case here: Don's life is full of social misunderstandings, and they're not the least bit contrived because there's nothing 'simple' about conversation for him. 

Don is clueless and rigid and sometimes unintentionally offensive, but he's also unbelievably entertaining (occasionally on purpose), endearingly well-intentioned, and often accidentally romantic in the determined lengths to which he will go to help Rosie with The Father Project. You cannot help but get in his corner as he fumbles his way--hilariously--toward true love against all odds. 

P.S. - I've just joined Sock Poppet's A to Z 2014 Reading Challenge, and I'm using this book for G is for Geography (the story takes place in at least two different countries), because it is set both in Australia and in New York City.