Book To Movie Club: Sitting Shiva with the Foxmans - This is Where I Leave You

A couple months ago a group of us went to see the movie Divergent together, after reading the book(s). We met for apps & cocktails beforehand and bought candy at Target to sneak into the theater. We had so much fun, including the occasional tween sounding scream for more skin to show on Four. The fun we had launched the idea to have a Book Club for books that were being made into movies, and we had a HelloGiggles article on 17 Books to Read Before the Movie Hits Theatres to lead us, #1 on the list being This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper.

The movie will be starring Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda so I was sold. Then I started reading it… I have mixed feelings about this book, but in the way that means it was written very well. If you look at my last blog post I talked about moving forward, which was hard to do when reading this book. I like to read books that let me escape from my own life, that take me into far off lands, characters, and mystery. This book is about a dysfunctional family that is “forced” to spend time together after the death of the patriarch of the family and includes experiences of loss, infertility, and real life struggles so it was hard to read even a paragraph without relating something in my life to what was going on in the book. I had to stop reading it a couple nights as my brain and stomach reacted to a well described scene. However, I knew BTM Club night was approaching so I barreled through, and I ended up being invested and entertained by the stories.

I do think this is the type of book that will make a great movie, so I am looking forward to seeing it when it comes out in September. It also brought me closer to a group of women and a really fun night of beer, wine and flatbreads. We had a group of 9 for a “Book to Movie Club” night at Stone Brewery Tap Room. It was amazing to have a group of us that works together and had something in common to talk about BESIDES WORK! We even discussed a few book club-ish questions. (Our favorite: "Whom do you finger as the most dysfunctional family member, including spouses?" If you’ve read it, leave a comment!)

Whether you want to read it or not, the movie should be good. Here is a teaser:
This Is Where I Leave You - Official Trailer

Almost all of us have already read Gone Girl (movie release in October? or 2015) so next up for BTM Club is Gillian Flynn’s other novel, Dark Places. (movie release date September 1).