Huzzah!  It’s “Buy a Book Not Written by Courtney” Day, and today, the book you should buy is Sherry Thomas’s Not Quite a Husband.  As you can tell from my post yesterday, I loved it!  (If you’re sitting on the fence, read the excerpt from Sherry’s website–I promise you, the book more than lives up to the potential you see there.)

Sherry was nice enough to offer up a copy of Not Quite a Husband for a commenter on yesterday’s post.  And the winner of Sherry’s book is . . . colleen!  Colleen, send me an e-mail at courtney@courtneymilan.com, and we’ll arrange delivery.

But as I’m headed to the bookstore today to get my own copy (yes, I read it early, but I want my very own official copy for my Sherry Thomas collection!), I figured I could pick up two (I’m also getting a copy of Diana Peterfreund‘s eagerly-awaited conclusion to her Secret Society series, Tap & Gown).  So Lesley, send me an e-mail as well!  You’ve won a copy, too.

Now onto the good stuff.  As you might have been able to tell from my last post, I think there’s some fascinating, complicated stuff going on in this book, and I would love to dish about some of it.  I’ve already talked to some people about Sherry Thomas’s newest on twitter, and thought to continue the discussion there.  (There’s already a few threads on it, if you search).

Here’s how you participate:

1. Get a twitter account  (if you don’t already have one)

2. To make sure people can find your tweets, mark your book-club discussion with the hashtag #nqah

3. You can use http://www.tweetchat.com to follow the #nqah hashtag, or search.twitter.com.  If you use tweetdeck or tweetie or almost any other twitter interface, you can create searches.

4. If you post a spoiler, you must encode it in ROT-13 so as not to spoil unsuspecting twitterers.

What’s ROT-13?  ROT-13 encoding is a code.   So you can post spoilers in ROT-13, and they’ll look like this:  Thrff jung! Crbcyr guvax Ybeq Vna vf znq!  That way, people who don’t want to be spoiled can avoid reading anything they don’t want to read.

The easiest way to write/read ROT-13 is to use Firefox and install Leet Key, a plugin that (among other things) can decode ROT-13.  Once you have the plugin installed, you can highlight text in ROT-13 (or the text you want to put into ROT-13), right click with your mouse, choose “Leet Key” then “Text Transformers” then “ROT-13.”  If you don’t use FireFox, or don’t want to install another plugin, you can use this webpage instead.

There is no time that’s too late for discussion.  The #lordian hashtag from the last twitter conversation is still in occasional use.  I imagine there will be talk for at least a week.  So grab the book, read on, and then join in the discussion!

So it is too early (by one day) to buy Sherry Thomas’s Not Quite a Husband. Still, it is early enough that I feel like I can gloat about having read an early copy of this book.

I don’t think anyone here needs to be told about Sherry Thomas.  Her debut novel, Private Arrangements, took the internet by storm.  Everyone was delighted by the mature characters, the elegant prose, the sly wit.  It was recognized as one ofPublisher’s Weekly’s best books of the year, is a Rita finalist in both the “Historical” and the “Best First Book” categories. . . .  And then, three months after the release of Private Arrangements, she did it again with Delicious–a book that would suffer from being called “elegant food porn” because the love affair with food was a romance, not pornography.

So when Sherry offered me the chance to read Not Quite a Husband early, I was all over it.

And how heavenly was Not Quite a Husband?  First, as always with Sherry, there was the writing–an elegant stretch of awesome that brought to life unfamiliar places.  I’ve never been to the Swat valley.  Heck, I’ve never even been to the requisite subcontinent.  But Sherry Thomas fooled me into believing I was there at every step of the way.

Second, there was the hero.  Leo Marsden is one of the most delicious heroes that Sherry has ever penned.  He’s sexy, obstinate, and steadfast without crossing the line into creepy-oh-my-god-a-stalker.  One of the things that makes Leo so appealling is that he recognizes on some level that his feelings for Bryony–a mix of love, despair, and worship–could become just a little weird if he doesn’t buck up and have a backbone.  This determination.  In some ways, this is his greatest strength . . . but it’s also, as you will see, his biggest weakness.  Like all tragic heroes, it’s Leo’s strength and individuality that ultimately does him in.

But finally, and most importantly, there’s the heroine.  Now, I have loved all of Sherry’s heroines.  I loved Gigi, for her strength of mind and independence, for her ability to see what she wanted and focus on it with laser-like intensity.  I loved Verity, for her skills, and because she would not give up no matter what life threw at her.  But Bryony . . . . I love Bryony like I’ve never loved a Sherry Thomas heroine before.  In fact, Bryony may be one of my favorite heroines ever.  She’s one of the most flawed, complex, and yet despite her prickly exterior, lovable heroines that I’ve ever read.  Like Leo, her greatest strength is her biggest weakness.  Bryony is smart and focused.  She is a doctor, and a damn good one, too, in an era when women were just beginning to become doctors.  In many ways, because of her upbringing, Bryony eschews the feminine.  She wears severe clothing, doesn’t think about boys, and . . . well, she’s not exactly the kind of doctor you’d call “nurturing.”  She’s brilliantly competent.  If you’re dying, she’s the one who will bring you kicking and screaming back into the daylight, but it’s a brisk, cool competence, not the warm, soft capability that you so often see ascribed to female doctors.

Like all truly intelligent people, Bryony is aware that this coolness hides a certain amount of brittle awkwardness.  When she falls for Leo, she never considers approaching him; she just assumes that she’s going to have to wait out her infatuation on the sidelines.  And when Leo reciprocates her feelings, she knows, deep down, that it’s too good to be true–but she’s too weak to walk away.  Bryony is one of the most fascinating, complicated heroines that I’ve read in a romance novel.  She’s prickly–but only because she’s afraid of her own vulnerability, and so she curls up like a hedgehog, sharp spines pointed outward.  I really empathized with Bryony every step of her journey.

As to what happens to these characters, let us just say that Sherry Thomas is going to make Bryony very, very vulnerable indeed–but without once robbing her of her innate dignity.  And that’s such an important line to me.

One of the things I love about Sherry Thomas is that I can read her books knowing that I’m going to get a good dose of unsettling.  She’s going to make me feel uncomfortable.  She’s going to make me feel the real pain that her characters must endure.  But, because Sherry writes romances–I know that at the end of the book, she is going to make it all better.  And she does.  The end of Not Quite a Husband made me feel like I was walking out of a dark movie theater into a bright, hot summer day–just a little dazed, my eyes blinking in the sunlight.

There are so many interesting aspects of this book that I want to talk about, and so tomorrow, on release day, I’m going to suggest that you join me on twitter under the hashtag #nqah to talk about Sherry Thomas’s newest.  I’ll post instructions in the morning.

But I’ll do more than that.  Sherry has been kind enough to offer up a free copy to one commenter.  As tomorrow is (you guessed it) “Buy a Book by Sherry Thomas” day, I figured we should hold the drawing early in the day so that the people who do not win will have all the extra impetus to . . . you know, Buy a Book by Sherry Thomas.

So leave a comment, and tell me your favorite kind of heroine.  One lucky commenter wins a copy of Not Quite a Husband!

The winners of the free copies of “Legend of the Werestag” are: 1. Rhonda W. 2. Louise Fury Jerrica Knight-Catania (Louise already won a copy) 3. Patty Rosellini Send me an e-mail to get your free copy!