Like a bad sitcom

I don’t know why I read this book. I didn’t particularly like the first one. And the only part I did like about the first one — the character of Rosie, who’s a little goofy but overall smart and warm — is barely even in this book. This book is pretty much ALL Don, and his obnoxious friend Gene, and the two of them make me crazy.

“I thought you were happy about having a baby.’ I was happy in the way that I would be happy if the captain of an aircraft in which I was travelling announced that he had succeeded in restarting one engine after both had failed. Pleased that I would now probably survive, but shocked that the situation had arisen in the first place, and expecting a thorough investigation into the circumstances.”

So the Tillmans have moved to New York, where Rosie is working on getting an MD and a PhD simultaneously, and Don is working on some kind of research project. Rosie gets pregnant accidentally-on-purpose, and Don flips out in his special way. The rest of the book is full of stupid actions by the characters — the main plot line occurs when Don gets arrested for taking pictures of kids at the park because he’s studying children in order to prepare for his impending fatherhood — and secret-keeping, which makes me crazy. And Rosie acts like a completely different person in this book, compared to the first. Don won’t communicate with her, so she just stops talking to him.

I believe that Simsion has written Don somewhere on the autism spectrum, although Don denies he has that condition to other characters in the book. But it’s not just his personality that frustrated me here — Rosie’s acting like a sitcom pregnant chick, despite her obvious intelligence. Don’s friends all give him terrible advice. One pretends to be Rosie for Don’s court-mandated counseling session. Basically, everyone’s willing to help Don avoid doing the one thing that would have cut the whole book short: TALK TO YOUR DAMN WIFE, DON.