The Highest & Lowest Rated Reese's Book Club Picks Of 2025 (So Far)

Reese's Book Club has, in the years since its launch, developed a reputation for dependable hits. With over three million loyal followers on Instagram and a talent for turning novels into bestsellers (and often screenplays), her monthly selections tend to be greeted with enthusiasm, if not near-automatic acclaim. But even a well-oiled machine can falter, and 2025 has offered a case study in how a single endorsement can yield two very different results.

Take "Broken Country," Witherspoon's March 2025 pick, a literary thriller by Clare Leslie Hall that devastated readers whilst keeping them compulsively glued to the story. The novel — incidentally one of the most heartbreaking reads from Reese's Book Club — depicts a cross-class romance between a farmer's daughter and the heir to the local manor. It accrued a 4.38 average rating on Goodreads, making it not only the highest-rated of her 2025 picks, but also the top rated thriller from Reese's Book Club, according to reviews. Witherspoon herself praised it as "a masterfully crafted mystery that will keep you guessing until the very last page," and readers agreed. One Goodreads remarked, with slightly stunned admiration, "this is what reading is all about." 

Then came "Stuck Up and Stupid," the summer YA selection by actress Angourie Rice and her mother, Kate Rice — a modern-day Austen remix that proved Reese's imprimatur is not, in fact, infallible. Attempting to reframe "Pride and Prejudice" through the lens of teenage fame, it was met with markedly less enthusiasm. Holding a woeful 2.87 Goodreads average, readers were, to put it mildly, unimpressed. "I was genuinely shocked when it was ... so ... bad," one wrote. Another, more succinctly, said, "Run." Ouch.

The broader data from Reese's 2025 picks point to a pattern: readers are gravitating towards narratively ambitious fiction. Clare Leslie Hall's "Broken Country," sits at the top, but it's flanked by "Great Big Beautiful Life (which unfolds around two reporters competing to break a story of a once-iconic socialite who's eluded the spotlight for three decades) and "Isola" (one of Reese's historical fiction picks about a French aristocrat's daughter, orphaned, and forced into the care of a dangerously temperamental man). Both sit healthily at a 4.03 average, suggesting that readers, far from craving breezy distraction alone, are in fact rewarding scope and sustained interiority.

Middle-of-the-road, moderately received titles like "All That Life Can Afford" and "The Phoenix Pencil Company" (both in the mid-3s) seem to indicate a degree of patience for lesser-known authors and works, but only when the writing meets the emotional standard the club has come to imply. The appetite for new voices is there, but it is not unconditional.

Where things unravel is in the YA category. "Stuck Up and Stupid," the lowest-rated pick of the year, is joined in the bottom tier by "Heiress Takes All," her spring YA selection. Both were met with a dilution of disappointment and derision, with one Goodreads bookworm saying of the latter, "It was so bad just thinking about having to finish reading would put me in a bad mood." If Reese's Book Club has ever been accused of leaning too commercial, these numbers show the audience has a sharper barometer. They're not here for glossy prose without substance. Witherspoon might do well to remember the difference between what's marketable and what's meaningful – and that her readers, young or otherwise, rarely need to be underestimated.