JD Vance's New Book Gets Brutal 1.27 Rating: '1 Star Because 0 Isn't An Option'

JD Vance's new spiritual memoir has walked straight into a critical buzzsaw, drawing a withering 'egregious sloppiness' verdict from the conservative Wall Street Journal as one-star reviews swamped its Goodreads page within hours of release.

The vice president published Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith on 16 June 2026 through HarperCollins, pitching the 304-page book as the story of his journey from atheism to Catholicism.

Reviewers across the political spectrum have torn into it, and ordinary readers dragged its Goodreads score down to roughly 1.27 stars out of five on launch day. The book has still climbed the bestseller charts, opening an odd gap between commercial muscle and critical contempt.

A Scathing Verdict From a Conservative Critic

The sharpest blow landed from the political right. Writing in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, columnist Barton Swaim, a former opinion editor at the conservative Weekly Standard, accused the book of 'egregious sloppiness' and read it as part spiritual memoir and part campaign document.

He suggested that anyone familiar with books by ambitious politicians would assume the author had an eye on the 2028 presidential race.

Swaim's central complaint concerned accuracy. He argued that Vance misrepresented the work of Vanessa Brown Calder, formerly of the Cato Institute, on paid parental leave, and concluded that the error stemmed from either laziness or dishonesty.

The columnist also charged Vance with reversing the self-reliance thesis of Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 bestseller, which had blamed his family's troubles on personal choices rather than on governments or corporations.

The Goodreads Pile-On and a Coordinated Backlash

Readers reached the book before most professional critics could. Within hours of release, the Goodreads listing is filled with dozens of one-star reviews, pulling the average down to about 1.27 stars. Many reviewers attacked Vance's politics rather than his prose, with one writing that he should follow the teachings of Jesus rather than Donald Trump.

Another reviewer summed up the mood in a single line, giving the book one star simply because zero was not an option.

The flood carried the hallmarks of a coordinated campaign rather than a measured literary reckoning. Some users posted one-star ratings before the book was even available, others mocked the title as a borrowing from bell hooks's 2002 work of the same name, and a few revived the 'childless cat ladies' jibe Vance made in 2021 and now walks back in the memoir.

The pattern means the Goodreads number reflects a political backlash at least as much as any verdict on the writing itself.

A Wider Critical Drubbing, From The Cut to The Telegraph

The professional reviews proved scarcely kinder. Ginny Hogan, writing for New York magazine's The Cut, declared that 'Vance's hypocrisy alone makes Communion nearly unreadable,' and likened the experience of reading it to a colonoscopy she had endured days earlier. She also savaged his thin portrait of his wife, the second lady Usha Vance, joking that he should ask a chatbot for synonyms beyond 'beauty' and 'intelligence.'

Other critics homed in on Vance's handling of scripture and ideas, according to a roundup by The New Republic. The Atlantic's Alexandra Petri ridiculed his gloss on the Book of Job, in which he compared human attempts to understand suffering to 'golden retrievers' puzzling over an iPhone.

The Telegraph's Christopher Howse judged that the memoir 'lacks the raw impact of Hillbilly Elegy,' while a New York Times review flagged an epilogue that ties declining Western birthrates to a call for Christian renewal.

The rollout has not been smooth throughout. The cover, unveiled earlier in the spring, featured Mt. Zion United Methodist Church rather than a Catholic one, and congregants of the rural Virginia church said they had no link to Vance or to Catholicism. The vice president, who converted in 2019 at the age of 35, has framed the book as a personal testimony, though its timing has fed persistent speculation about a White House bid in 2028.

Vance set out to write the story of finding his faith, and instead handed his critics a sermon they were only too glad to pick apart.