What's The Highest Rated Reese's Book Club Pick Of All Time?

The Reese's Book Club effect is, by now, a known quantity. A single selection can elevate a modest mid-list title into a publishing juggernaut, selling upwards of 100,000 copies in a matter of days, and permanently altering the trajectory of an otherwise little-known author's career. According to BookScan, books chosen by Witherspoon routinely outperform the average market by as much as 700% (via NPR).

Reese's Book Club picks tend to follow a pattern — emotionally high-stakes, female-driven, narratively propulsive, commercially minded — and so do the adaptations. "Little Fires Everywhere," "Daisy Jones & The Six," and "The Last Thing He Told Me" became mini TV franchises in their own right. By 2019, not a single Reese's Book Club pick had sold fewer than 10,000 copies. "Where the Crawdads Sing" soared so far beyond expectations that it outsold Michelle Obama's record-breaking "Becoming," one of the best books written by First Ladies.

While many authors have benefited from Witherspoon's Midas touch, "The Nightingale," by Kristin Hannah has humbly eclipsed them all. First published in 2015 and reintroduced by the club in 2023, the novel now holds the highest Goodreads rating of any Reese's Book Club pick to date: an astonishing 4.64 stars from more than 1.7 million readers — all without a screen adaptation (though that is in the works).

The Nightingale is one of Reese's Book Club's historical fiction picks, with the woman herself declaring it "arguably one of the most powerful, most captivating novels about WWII in recent years." Importantly, it hinges upon what Reese Witherspoon called "a part of history that's often overlooked: the women's war."

Kristin Hannah tells the story of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, in Nazi-occupied France — the former cautious and pragmatic, the latter bold and rebellious. As war closes in, their paths diverge. Vianne is left behind to protect her daughter and forced to make unthinkable choices just to keep her family safe. A restless Isabelle, on the other hand, throws herself into the Resistance to fight the Nazis, taking on the codename "Nightingale."

Though this is a fictional work, Hannah drew on real accounts of female resistance as inspiration — most notably that of Andrée de Jongh, who helped Allied airmen escape Nazi territory on foot. It's this poignancy that earned "The Nightingale" it's place in the Reese's Book Club canon, where it was tagged with labels like "all the things" and "pass the tissues."

Readers resonated with the book deeply. On GoodReads, reactions are intensely personal. One five-star reviewer confessed, "With tears still running down my cheeks, I'm writing this review," as another said, "This book was absolutely phenomenal. Outside of my comfort zone for sure, but it's opened me up to a whole new genre that I never thought I'd be interested in."