Hello there and welcome to Thursday Movie Picks a weekly series where you share your picks each Thursday. The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five titles and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page here.
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This week's Thursday Movie Picks is TMP Television Edition - Companion Reads (Pair a book to a TV/mini series that makes a good companion read because they feature similar themes/subject - not necessarily the book it was based on)
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The first two picks were easy finds and what inspired the whole Companion Reads, the last was a little hard to think of.
Lost in Austen (2008) and A Visitor's Guide to Jane Austen's England (2014)
Lost in Austen follows a modern woman, a fan of Jane Austen, who finds a portal to the world of Pride and Prejudice. Switching places with Elizabeth Bennet, she pretends to be Elizabeth’s friend visiting her home. I love this mini series, it is so much fun to see a present day woman trying to live in regency England; I remember there was a scene where she couldn’t identify the instruments to brush her teeth with…it was twigs and some cleaning powder. A perfect companion read is the non-fiction A Visitor's Guide to Jane Austen's England. It is such a fun and insightful read covering how people of the time lived and socialized, how they traveled, the fashion of the time, money matters, what they shopped and do for leisure, marriage and also health. I think this book provides very good context for anyone reading a Jane Austen or regency novel.
A Teacher (2020) and Tampa (2013), My Dark Vanessa (2020)
In limited series A Teacher, a teacher has an inappropriate relationship with her student. I thought this was interesting as it gives the perspective of both teacher and student. Two good companion reads to A Teacher are Tampa and My Dark Vanessa, though I do think there is a difference in that the teacher in A Teacher was unhappy about her life and the relationship she started with her student was part of her imploding her life instead of making certain difficult decisions, while the teachers in the two books are a lot more predatory in that they went into teaching specifically to get access to children. Tampa is quite controversial, it is a first person narrative of a teacher, Celeste, so you are basically in the head of a predator and she is unrepentant in her pursuit and conquest of teenage boys. My Dark Vanessa is from the perspective of a woman, Vanessa, now in her 30s who had a relationship with her teacher when she was 15, one she is adamant was consensual. However, as the Me Too movement gets more press coverage and previous allegations of sexual abuse by other students resurfaced against her teacher along with new allegations, she reluctantly reexamines their relationship…was she too just another victim. Of the two books I definitely recommend My Dark Vanessa, the middle of which is a bit long but the last quarter or so was really good.
In Home Before Dark, a young girl, an aspiring journalist, starts her own newspaper and begins to dig into the unsolved case of her father's still missing best friend who had been abducted as a child, where she believes the man imprisoned for his supposed involvement in the crime was wrongly convicted. A good companion read is The Good Girls Guide To Murder, it is quite similar in that they both have precocious girls trying to investigate a crime in which they believe the main suspect was falsely accused and the victims are still missing. In The Good Girls Guide To Murder, five years ago, a teen girl went missing and the prime suspect is her boyfriend who eventually committed suicide after texting a confession of her murder. In the present day, Pip, a girl in her last year of school before university decides to make a podcast for her final year school project focusing on the local murder suicide as she believes the boyfriend was falsely accused and the real killer is still out there living among them.
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