At least two websites have limited or suspended reviews for Vice President JD Vance’s new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, in a move some claim was in response to a flood of negative reviews.
Both Amazon and the Amazon-owned book-reviewing site Goodreads have restricted reviews for the book, which was released on Tuesday and details Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism.
The Kamala Harris-affiliated X account @HQNewsNow first flagged that reviews had been turned off on Thursday, sharing a screenshot of several one-star reviews published to Goodreads as well as a pop-up message telling users that “rating this book is temporarily unavailable.” The Daily Beast was unable to independently verify these reviews.
Visiting the Goodreads listing for Communion, the Daily Beast encountered the same message when attempting to access the review function, and no ratings of the book are visible.
The message is also visible on the Goodreads listing for Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy, which was published in 2016. Unlike Communion, reviews for Hillbilly Elegy are still visible, with the most recent review being published on Thursday. It has an average star rating of 3.83.
On Amazon, the ability to review the book has been restricted to verified buyers, leaving only seven reviews on the site: six 5-star and one 2-star.
As Goodreads is owned by Amazon, book listings on the site often include details of the book’s average Goodreads rating. This information is still visible on the Amazon listing for Communion, which states that the book has an average rating of 1.3 stars based on 45 reviews.
On Barnes & Noble’s listing for the book, reviews remain open, and it has a 1.3-star rating based on 25 reviews.
Goodreads’ rating and review guidelines state that they only remove ratings and reviews in “specific, limited situations,” including cases in which users have rated books without reading them, rated books “based on factors irrelevant to the contents of the book,” ratings that “artificially inflate or deflate a book’s average rating” or where they have identified “unusual rating patterns that suggest automated or inauthentic behavior.”
Review-bombing, where a large number of internet users publish inauthentic reviews of businesses or products, has a long history on the internet, and is an issue Goodreads has sought to address in the past.
In 2023, the site announced that it had introduced the ability to temporarily limit submissions of ratings and reviews “during times of unusual activity that violate our guidelines.”
“This kind of activity is not tolerated on Goodreads and it diminishes the community’s trust in people who participate,” a statement from Goodreads published at the time read.
It is unclear how many of the negative reviews that were removed from Goodreads and Amazon were from legitimate readers.
The Daily Beast has contacted representatives for Vance and Amazon for comment.
While the book may have been subjected to review-bombing from critics of the Trump administration, genuine reviews of Vance’s second attempt at writing a book were not much better.
“I got a colonoscopy on Friday,” wrote Ginny Hogan in her review of the book for The Cut. “If only that were the least pleasant experience of my last week. But no, that would be when I pulled an all-nighter on Monday reading Communion.”
Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swaim argued that the book suffered from “egregious sloppiness,” citing an instance in which Vance had the wrong takeaway from a paper about parental leave.
“Whether Mr. Vance’s error arose from laziness or dishonesty or something else, I don’t know, but alas it typifies the low regard he has for people who profess views he dislikes,” Swaim wrote.
“If he wins the presidency, one hopes he can take his own counsel to practice humility in the face of difficult questions. But by then, he may have a different set of views.”
Salon’s Molly Olmstead describes the vice president’s second memoir as feeling like two distinct books: the first half is a thoughtful meditation on trauma and fatherhood, while the second is “a stiff and unimaginative political memoir.”
“The tragedy of Vance’s new book is that this split reminds you of who he used to be,” Olmstead writes. “It’s not only that he squandered a decent beginning, but that he revealed how far he has fallen from the thoughtful young man who once had something original to say.”
