The Highest & Lowest Rated Read With Jenna Book Club Picks Of 2025 (So Far)

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Jenna Bush Hager has been churning out monthly reading picks for Read With Jenna Book Club since 2019, and 2025 already has some good hits. If you want a guaranteed page-turner, look no further than May's choice, "The Names" by Florence Knapp. The story follows a young mom, Cora, who is torn between naming her baby son after his father and grandfather, who carried on generational abuse. Her daughter, Maia, convinces her to name him Bear, and readers are taken on a 35-year journey to see how the simple act of changing a name affects the lives of the characters. Knapp's debut novel received a 4.2 rating on both Goodreads and Amazon, cementing it as one of the best Read with Jenna Book Club picks of all time.

Meanwhile, hovering around 3.2 on Goodreads, Jessica Soffer's novel, "This is a Love Story," didn't fare so well with readers. The premise of the story sounds promising enough — Abe and Jane are two artists who meet and fall in love and have a baby named Max. Years later, as Jane is dying from cancer, she and Abe reflect on their lives together with Central Park as the backdrop. However, many were put off by Soffer's style of writing, with one reader complaining, "I simply found it exhausting to read 'You remember...' every single sentence for pages and pages." Still, there were some that gave the book high marks, and Bush Hager has proven that most of her picks for the first half of 2025 were mostly well-received.

Despite the low reviews for Soffer's novel, most of Read With Jenna's picks for 2025 have sat well with readers. For instance, while Florence Knapps' "The Names" received high marks, "Heartwood" by Amity Gaige trailed closely behind. The Read With Jenna Book Club thriller and mystery pick for April centered around a lost hiker named Valerie Gillis, who is being searched for by Lieutenant Bev Miller around the Appalachian Trail. As news of Gillis' disappearance gets out, a curious stranger, Lena Kucharski, does her own investigation from afar and learns that it may not have been accidental. Readers were gripped by the suspenseful tale, and one reviewer wrote on Amazon, "This book just takes you on an adventure, and it doesn't stop until the very last page. I love reading books about hiking, and this story felt like I was hiking right along with Valerie."

Another Jenna Bush Hager pick that did well was "Happy Wife," by Meredith Lavender and Kendall Shores. If you want a beach read for your 2025 summer, this suspense about a 28-year-old's new rich husband gone missing will have you hooked. "I inhaled this book! It was so fun and twisty and suspenseful and perfect for summer! It had short chapters, a current timeline and a past timeline, a very likable FMC, and lots of rich, secretive characters," a Goodreads reviewer wrote. With the exception of "This is a Love Story" and "The Dream Hotel," which also got less than four stars, Bush Hager's 2025 picks have been popular with readers so far, and there are a handful of great reads that'll be sure to have you hooked.