Escaping into My Books

What a delightful book! From the first chapters after being in Don's head for a bit, I knew what his diagnosis was, and what made him so unique. What an interesting idea to write a love story from the point of view of someone with Aspergers. 

It was so interesting to live in his carefully ordered head, and I don't know what it says about me, but I found him to be perfectly logical and all his reasoning to make sense. If you view him as an adult, who has the social skills of a child. Children are just learning to read people and emotions and social cues....so because they have so little experience in what is acceptable, they sometimes make mistakes or cross lines they don't know exist. They are inexperienced and naive. Prefect description of our hero.

Like the little kid that sees an overweight lady and sees no problem in telling her she is fat, or just blurting out anything that comes into their heads, even if it embarrasses everyone in the room. It is not malice...just inexperience with what is socially acceptable that is the culprit. This is Don. He doesn't understand the subtly of emotions everyone else does...so he misunderstands and miscalculates all the social cues...and causes him embarrassment. So rather than be dragged down by it and being depressed...he figured he might as well go with it: play the class clown. Play up his weirdness...because that is how he found some acceptance. And that is all he wants in the end. It is only until he meets Rosie, and despite all his logic and structure...he finds himself slowly doing things he had long shut himself from because he was too "weird", and he realizes that his life as he lived it was no longer satisfactory to him. Just a slight change to his perfectly ordered life, sets off what turned out to be a massive life altering action. His adventure into love was very entertaining and poignant, the last something he could never understand being who he is. And like Don's mind...the story was perfectly, logically told...like he was writing a thesis or scientific study. lol. This for him is not that much of an exaggeration.  I thought it was a great decision to write the book in this manner. From Don' head. First person.  It pulled the reader right into Don's head and way of thinking, so you really understood him, and empathized with him....and it had the added affect to providing so much humor due to Don's dry, emotionless thinking. From the first couple chapters I was laughing out loud. Some of my favorite lines

One his Date that had the Ice Cream Disaster:

"The Waiter brought the dessert menus and Elizabeth said, 'I don't like Asian Desserts'

This was most certainly an unsound generalization, based on limited experience and perhaps I should have recognized it as a warning sign."

Upon Meeting Julie at the lecture:

"I immediately recognized Julie, the convener, from, Gene's description: "blonde with big tits." In fact her breasts were probably no more than one and a half standard deviations from the mean size for her body weight and hardly a remarkable identifying feature."

His first Dinner with Rosie:

“I put the lobster in the freezer and explained to Rosie that I had researched lobster execution methods, and the freezer method was considered the most humane. I gave her a website reference.

"While the lobster die, Rosie continued her sniffing around"

Anyway...this was a lovely reading break from dragons and magic. Cute, funny, and unique.