Read With Jenna's Very First Book Pick Is A Heartbreaking And Love Affirming Family Saga

As of 2025, the Read With Jenna book club has assumed a curious place in the American literary ecosystem: populist in reach, but increasingly literary in taste. Since 2019, morning television mainstay Jenna Bush Hager has been assembling a canon of contemporary fiction that span genres, but always circle back to the heart: sunlit beach reads for your summer reading list, tender coming-of-age picks that ache with recognition, and thrillers and mysteries, curdling beneath the surface. With the announcement of the Read With Jenna Book Festival — a book club meeting IRL, with its first iteration in May 2025 — it's safe to say the former First Daughter's project has become institutional.

Still, the sensibility was there from the outset. Tara Conklin's "The Last Romantics," Jenna's inaugural selection, is an unabashedly earnest novel. It signaled a clear intention: this would be a book club interested in love-affirming fiction and emotional interiority. In the aftershock of a formative loss, a simple question is asked of a famous poet: what was the inspiration behind her defining work, "The Love Poem." Conklin's novel then spans decades and traces the complicated ties between four siblings. Left to navigate life without parental order, they drift, but remain inextricably entangled. It was an unexpectedly literary first choice for a mainstream book club, but it laid the foundation for everything the club would become.

The selection of Tara Conklin's "The Last Romantics" was, unsurprisingly, met with great enthusiasm from Jenna Bush Hager herself. "I'm really excited about it. It's about siblings, which I think is fascinating...but coping with the tragedy, and how their whole lives kind of unravel and come together," she said on the TODAY show. On Instagram, Jenna shared a passage she loved: "We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all of our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it." This certainly captured the novel's heartfelt emotional core.

But for all its ambition, "The Last Romantics" landed unevenly with readers. With a Goodreads average of 3.7, the novel drew both lavish praise and pointed critique. "Beautifully written and emotional," one admirer raved. Another noted Conklin's "breathtaking, lyrical and captivating" prose.

Detractors were just as vocal. "I felt that the quality of the writing couldn't match the ambition of the plot," one wrote. Another was more blunt: "The characters were unlikable...I just didn't care." Criticism focused on what some saw as forced symbolism and a superfluous futuristic timescale. There was also a blog subplot that one reader called "a disturbing misreading of feminism." It's worth noting that Bush Hager hadn't actually finished the novel before recommending it to the nation — an oversight that may explain the polarized response. But perhaps that's fitting. For a book so deeply invested in the messiness of familial bonds, it seems only appropriate that it would inspire the sort of conflicting reactions one might expect around any family dinner table.