Between the Pages

Don Tillman is a highly intelligent but socially inept professor of genetics. He is able to count his friends on one hand, is painfully literal and brutally honest – not through any cruelty, but just through lack of social skills. When he decides that he needs a wife, he acts in typical fashion and devises a questionnaire to select the perfect candidate and weed out anyone who is not suitable.

So when Rosie walks into his life, Don immediately dismisses her as entirely unsuitable – she smokes, drinks, is led by emotion rather than logic and is habitually late. She is also on a mission to find out the identity of her real father – and Don, as a geneticist, is ideally placed to help her. As they become friends and go through a number of adventures to obtain the DNA of the various candidates, Don finds that sometimes emotions do trump logic, and what should make two people incompatible can sometimes be exactly what makes them click with each other.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book from start to finish. It is narrated from Don’s point of view, which gives plenty of opportunity for humour, and also means that the reader empathises with him in a way that wouldn’t have been so easy if it were told in the third person. I also really liked Rosie – she is feisty, intelligent and witty, and the two of them made a great main couple of characters as they navigated the highs and lows of friendship.

The ending really made me smile as well – it covers more than just the outcome of the friendship between Don and Rosie – and manages to be both surprising and heartwarming.

I highly recommend this book and am already looking forward to reading the sequel, The Rosie Effect.