Goodreads Won’t Let You Say Bad Things About JD Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’

Goodreads has temporarily disabled rating and reviewing Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir of republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance. As first reported by 404 Media, users who try are met with a popup letting them know they can’t. “This book has temporary limitations on submitting ratings and reviews,” the popup says. “This may be because we’ve detected unusual behavior that doesn’t follow our review guidelines.”

Reached by phone, Goodreads pointed Gizmodo to the popup on its website and declined to comment further on the matter.

A junior Senator from Ohio, Vance’s list of bizarre and awful takes is long. He’s said that the U.S. needs a “de-Ba’athification” program, argued that daylight savings time hurts women’s fertility, and earnestly shared his opinion that Star Wars: The Last Jedi was a “cruel movie.”

But before all that he was selling out his “hillbilly” family in Appalachia in a bestselling 2016 memoir. The book details Vance’s early life, his mother’s struggle with drug addiction, and his high-falutin opinions on the white rural poor he claimed as his own. The book was a smash hit. People in Appalachia hated it. Netflix turned it into a movie starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams that critics hated.

People often express their displeasure at artists and writers on online review platforms. Sites that allow user ratings (like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and Steam) face a problem where users leave negative reviews of a piece of art because they’re mad at the creators or tied up in some bizarre culture war nonsense. It’s called review bombing, and it happens all the time.

Goodreads has been at the center of many review bombing controversies over the years. No one is more vicious to each other online than young adult book fans. To combat review bombing, Goodreads launched a system in October of 2023 that temporarily halts user reviews when it detects review posts that it believes violate its guidelines.

Goodreads announced the new system in a blog post last year. Hillbilly Elegy is not the first time it’s been deployed. In December, it had limited reviews on the book Israel by Noa Tishby. In March, it did the same for the book To Gaze Upon Wick Gods by Molly X Chang.

Users on Amazon, which owns Goodreads, are not facing a similar restriction. The recent reviews of Hillbilly Elegy on Amazon are full of 1 and 5-star reviews.

“This book is much like the man who wrote it- garbage,” said a one-star review posted on July 16. “It is inflammatory towards mountain people, so harsh and critical and lacks any basic understanding of post industrial collapse in a region that is rife with political oppression and lack of representation, basic infrastructure, and international corporations as absentee landowners that pay little to no taxes to support the local community base. Mix this with the landscape and of course you have a resilient group of people worn down to accept their lot in life with little ways to change their reality.”

For anyone looking to understand the historical and economic pressures that shaped Appalachia, may I suggest Night Comes to the Cumberlands?