The Genre We Wish Reese's Book Club Would Pick More Often
The world according to Reese's Book Club has a type. Contemporary fiction, domestic suspense, historical drama, thrillers and mysteries, and the occasional memoir are all united by one key principle under Witherspoon's literary memoir. Every pick promises a woman at the heart of the story — a corrective to the sidelined female roles Witherspoon encountered so often in her career.
That frustration was, famously, the driving force behind the club's creation: a desire to amplify stories where women aren't just emotional ballast. The result is a list that champions female voices, both on and off the page — since the titles are usually women-written. It's a selection style that's proved as popular as it is powerful; the club boasts 3 million followers on Instagram, and its backing has played an unparalleled role in the success of numerous bestsellers and screen adaptations.
But for all its scope, the club rarely ventures beyond realism. The stories may span time periods and geographies (notably through her best historical fiction picks and her recommended beach reads for your summer reading list), but they are all grounded in a world that mirrors our own, consistently steering clear of the speculative or surreal.
Reese's only foray into fantasy was a YA outlier
The absence of fantasy from Reese's shelves grows more conspicuous in light of the current publishing market. Fantasy saw a dramatic rise during the pandemic, and by 2021, its sales had jumped 45% from the year before. Audiobook revenues told a similar story: the genre brought in $1.6 billion. The magic hasn't worn off. As the Guardian reported, fantasy book sales continue to surge, with their value increasing by more than 41% between 2023 and 2024.
Helping to drive that surge is "romantasy" — the swooning, sword-wielding subgenre that has turned BookTok into an impressively effective sales funnel. A hybrid of romance and fantasy fiction, it pairs enchanted realms and perilous quests with slow-burning desire and magical relationships. Readers can't stop buying fantasy series like Sarah J. Maas' "A Court of Thorns and Roses" and Rebecca Yarros' "Fourth Wing," which have been dominating the NYT bestsellers list. But for all its fanfare, the genre has yet to be properly ushered through the gates of Reese's closely guarded canon.
That said, there has been, if not a precedent, then at least a faint opening. In 2021, "Within These Wicked Walls" by Lauren Blackwood was chosen as the club's YA book for fall. Marketed as a gothic reimagining of "Jane Eyre," the novel trades the Yorkshire moors for an Ethiopian-inflected spiritual landscape, where Andromeda, a teenage exorcist, arrives at a decaying estate. Witherspoon said of the novel, "I was so drawn into this magical world and its mysterious characters as they risk it all to ban an evil spirit from an old castle." It was a single spell cast, and none since.