3 Reese’s Book Club Selections That Reviewers Say You Can Skip

Some books walk a tightrope — controversial enough to split readers right down the middle, and people either love it or absolutely hate it. “Where the Crawdads Sing” remains a highly-rated book on Goodreads and Amazon and was even adapted into a film, but many readers are left feeling confused as to how and why. As popular as the book is, it is often reviewed from time to time on the r/books subreddit, which boasts more than 26 million members. And there are hardly any positive discussions or reviews on it. “I made myself finally finish this book, and I’m furious,” one user wrote. “It was not just a waste of time … it feels like it took part of my soul with it … I have literally NO idea why it is so popular. The more I think about it, the angrier I get. It was truly awful.”

Many people agreed with the user’s sentiments. Even our writer got a good laugh from the bad reviews as she couldn’t help but agree. She struggled to get past half of the book because of its overly dramatic prose. Another reviewer wrote, “I envied Kya’s mother for walking out of this book on page 6 and not having to suffer through the rest of it like I did.” Despite these negative reviews, the book is also loved by many for its blend of romance and murder mystery. So while you don’t need to automatically add it to your skip list, the negative reviews are something worth considering before you dive in.

While there are books like “Where the Crawdads Sing” that divide readers, there are others that unite them — and no, not in a good way. Some have many people agreeing that, at best, the work was just average. A good example of this is a February ’21 pick of Reese’s Book Club, “The Sanatorium” by Sarah Pearse. Reviewed by more than 190,000 people on Goodreads, the book maintains a measly 3.36-star rating, with 38% of the reviewers giving the book a 3-star rating and only 12% giving it five stars. 

“This should have been 5 stars, so many chilling and gruesome elements were present, but it just never delivers,” one reviewer wrote. “The ending is a complete ‘this is how I did it’ dump, which really sucks. … Quite a let down.” While many readers loved the setting of the story and suspenseful elements, others felt there was not much character development and criticized the poor plot execution. One sentiment that was brought up over and over again was that the book had so much potential but failed to live up to it.

As a Reese’s Book Club pick, there were high expectations for this novel, but it doesn’t seem it lived up to the hype for many. Lots of readers seemed excited to jump into a mystery thriller set in the Swiss Alps but were left disappointed by the author’s inability to fully deliver on the story’s eerie premise. With that in mind, you may want to add this book to your skip list. 

Reese Witherspoon introduced this book as a September ’22 historical fiction pick and called it “an utterly original and brilliant story.” And while some readers thought “On the Rooftop” by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton was a beautiful tale, many couldn’t help but disagree with Witherspoon. One reviewer summed it up nicely: “I felt that the whole of the book was contained in the book description and nothing much happened. Too much telling and not enough action. I didn’t feel that I got to know the characters so I was not very invested in them. … the story was slow and lackluster.”

After reading through so many reviews, “lackluster” might be the perfect word to describe the average reader’s experience with this story. While many felt the prose itself was very strong, the plot development left people wanting more. “I was so disappointed by this book given how excited I was by it,” one reviewer wrote. “It’s just a series of events among characters we’re not given enough to care about or grow to love or hate. There’s no climax, and essentially no plot.” Overall, the story unfolds at a slow pace, and many readers seem to have trouble staying interested in the narrative. If you’re big on making connections with characters, exciting plot twists, and story depth, this may be another Reese’s Book Club pick that you’ll want to skip.

We approached putting this list together with a lot more caution than any other book list we’ve prepared. The last thing we want to do is scare readers away from books that could potentially be an enjoyable read for them and even discourage readers from reaching their reading goals for the year. That’s why, for this list, our goal was to provide readers with a balanced perspective from common insights we found from our research of many books. The titles we selected for this list either had seriously polarizing reviews or were generally rated as average. 

To present a balanced perspective, we started at Amazon. We sought out titles with an almost even split between 5-star reviews and 2- or 3-star reviews. We also focused on books that seemed to just fall flat and had overall low ratings around or below a 3.5 average. Once we gathered a list of titles that met these requirements, we began our research on why these titles might have received polarizing or just below-average reviews. We turned to Amazon, the r/books subreddit, blogs run by avid readers, and Goodreads, as they often provide detailed insight as to why titles might have received the reviews they did. Once we accomplished this, we were able to narrow down the list to the top three titles we felt were worth bringing to your attention.