The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)

The fact that the ensemble of characters in this romantic comedy (based on a Karen Joy Fowler bestseller) spend each month reading a Jane Austen novel and meeting to discuss it simply means that they are forever comparing Austen's troubled marriages, burgeoning romances, and complicated love triangles to their own: these parallels come thick and fast but are superficial, meaning you can smile - very gently - at this romcom even if you've never read a word of Austen yourself.

★★★☆☆

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The Glass House (2001)

A really excellent thriller about a newly orphaned heir to a fortune, possibly the target of a foster parents' murder plot, is Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting, a book I ripped through on the beach last summer, but this thriller, with its moribund first thirty minutes and a garbled plot about villainous foster parents who get their comeuppance even before they've realised their villainy and coordinated their dastardly plot, stars Diane Lane and Stellan Skarsgård as the impossibly beset foster parents and a stony Leelee Sobieski as the never-really-imperilled foster teenager.

★☆☆☆☆

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