WIN A COPY OF OPPOSITES ATTACK. BLOG ABOUT YOUR FAVE UNLIKELY LITERARY COUPLES FOR REDROOM.COM

From Redroom.com, where the writers are, comes a fun way to win a copy of my new novel, Opposites Attack.

“Mr. Collins is a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know he is, as well as I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who married him cannot have a proper way of thinking.” –Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Austen neatly characterizes the disagreeable clergyman here, yet doesn’t condemn intelligent, sympathetic Charlotte Lucas for marrying him. (The seemingly odd couple appears to have a happy marriage, too.) Unlikely romantic couples are often thrown together as a result of unlikely circumstances—a spooky farmhouse for Wuthering Heights’Heathcliff and Catherine, a Third-World hostage crisis for Roxane Cross and Mr. Hosokawa in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. Even the different personalities that mark nonromantic “dynamic duos” like Huckleberry Finn and Jim, or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, deepen characterization while driving the plots of our favorite books.

Please write this week about your favorite unlikely couple in literature. Why did the author put them together, and why did they end up together or apart? Please tag your post favorite unlikely couple blog.

Jo Maeder’s two most recent books contain two very different examples: In her memoir, How I Married My Mother, Maeder leaves her fast-paced New York life to care for her estranged, declining mother in the South. In her novel, Opposites Attack, a seemingly superficial American woman clashes with a famous, cultured French writer at an immersion school in the south of France. Two lucky bloggers will receive copies of Opposites Attack.

Click here to enter. Deadline June 7th. Good luck!