Gabriel Roth

Self-deprecating, lifelong nerd Eric Mueller has spent years attempting to apply the tricks of computer coding, which has earned him millions of dollars, to women. As a freshman in high school, Eric keeps a notebook filled with data on potential girlfriends. The list's only requirement: "Would I prefer to be involved with her or to graduate high school without ever acquiring a girlfriend?" In his adulthood, Eric is better able to turn his awkwardness into charm, but will he allow his show more feelings to override facts when he meets the perfect girl?

Roth opens The Unknowns at a party, which is a perfect setup for Eric's fumbling wit, but also allows readers to watch his acute sense of observation at work. In hilarious anecdotes, Eric takes notes on the people around him, mastering the art of partygoing and, eventually, picking up women.

Throughout the novel Roth flashes between Eric's teenage years, as he navigates the social waters of high school, and 2002, where he is dealing with a budding romance. It is in the later storyline that the book takes a surprising, but spot-on, turn. Rather than a comedic tale of a nerd's coming of age, this change takes The Unknowns a step deeper.

Gabriel Roth uses an insightful, funny voice to bring Eric's character to life, while giving him the depth to explore more than just the surface of relationships. The Unknowns is a great little book you will find yourself peeling through, looking forward to the next laugh.

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From The Book Wheel:

Note: I won this book in a Twitter giveaway from @littlebrown

Have you ever read a book that has you wanting to tear your hair out because you are so torn on how you should be reacting to it? This is one of those books. On the one hand, I loved it. I read it, more or less, from start to finish and could not put it down. Plus, it takes place around Denver, where I live, and a lot of the locations are real, so it was easily to visualize. But…. I feel a little disconnected show more from the decade that I grew up/went to high school in.

Let me explain. The Unknowns is the story of a computer geek named Eric. A total nerd in high school who had his fair share of embarrassments, he becomes a multi-millionaire by the age of 24 by doing exactly what he was previously made fun of for doing. Of course, with money comes more opportunities for social exchanges, and this awkward kid learns to navigate the world of women. But soon he learns that not everything is as it seems and, at the root of things, there are unknowns (when I first started reading, I thought The Unknowns were people, but of course, they aren’t – they are the things about others that we don’t know, and in hindsight, this was fairly obvious).

But back to my point. In the book, Eric is only four years older than I am. While I could relate to a lot of his high school agony, whether on behalf of him or his antagonizers, most of his high school days are about the desire to conceal his computer geekiness. The problem with this is that I don’t remember computers being so foreign in 1996. I had a family computer with AOL and chatrooms and word processing at that time. And I certainly don’t remember dark dungeon-like classrooms for the computer nerds to run off to during lunch. Perhaps this was the case when Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were doing their thing, but I don’t remember this being an issue when I was in high school. Then again, maybe my school just had an inordinate amount of technology and so it wasn’t as taboo as it was in other schools.

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I was completely intrigued by the premise of this book, "Eric has been trying to hack the girlfriend problem his whole life". I thought that this book would be about a guy approaching relationships as a purely logical problem, and in the beginning it was. He even created a notebook in middle school about all the girls he had in his classes to gather data. I was hooked, then Eric meets a girl Maya and it changes into a book about having a relationship with someone who has been abused. There show more is even a fairly significant portion of the book related to repressed memories versus false memory syndrome. The book was well written, I was just disappointed that it didn't really follow through with the original story premise. show less

I have really mixed feelings about this book. The beginning of the book was a put-off for me (I thought - "oh no, this is not my kind of book at all") but I'm not a quitter and as I continued to read, I found myself drawn into the story of socially inept Eric who overthinks and calculates almost every action. At times I felt sorry for Eric, struggling with every day life and his lack of experiencing anything; at times I was in awe of the way the mind of a computer "nerd" works; and, at times show more I wanted to give Eric a swift kick in the butt. After reading other reviews, I think I might have missed something or I'm just not savvy enough to read between the lines.

I received a free copy of The Unknowns: A Novel through Goodreads Firstreads. show less