WeHa Book Club

*Spoiler Free Review*

Everyone has their own personal rating system. Well… most of you probably just finish reading a book and move on with your lives which I’ll admit is a much healthier approach… But for my fellow book nerds, every system is unique! Some are more generous with their ratings, others are incredibly harsh, and I probably fall somewhere in between.

I tend to treat stars like school grades meaning 3½ stars is roughly a C- grade, or 70%. A book has to be pretty awful to score a 2 or lower (think below 40% on a paper) and a true 5 (100%) is very difficult to achieve. Perfection is, after all, by its nature hard to come by.

In fact, since I’ve started tracking and rating the books I’ve read, I’ve only given out five 5-star reviews in total. It’s still pretty rare territory in my system.

These are books that deserve their own spoiler free review no matter when I happened read them, as well as their very own special section of the website for “Five Star Books” (oooo ahhhh). To be immortalized forever.

So without further ado, let’s get to my review (unintentional rhyme) of 11/22/63:

For the uninitiated, Stephen King is a whole lot more than a horror writer. I have unapologetically become a King superfan as I’ve dug deeper and deeper into his extensive bibliography. Last year was a particularly heavy Stephen King year for me, reading 23 of his works. I had only read 8 King novels prior to that so you could fairly say he dominated my focus in 2025.

While I’ve thoroughly enjoyed some of the spookier, super-natural Stephen King offerings such as Pet Semetary, Carrie and IT, I’m often more taken by his grounded stories. And even in the aforementioned books, it’s the exploration of loss in Pet Semetary, the experience of being a social outcast in Carrie and the coming-of-age tale in IT that really elevate these novels to greatness.

11/22/63 is a wonderful example of King threading that needle. After all, it is, on the surface, a time travel action adventure where our main character, Jake Epping, is attempting to stop the assassination of JFK. But outside of the ‘main quest’, the story of a life-lived – no matter what time period that life is being lived in – dominates my memory of this book.

I hesitate to say too much because I think there’s something special about picking up a time-travel book and realizing how much depth lies between the covers, but I feel comfortable at least offering this:

11/22/63 is arguably the greatest love story I’ve ever read.

I’ll leave it at that for now. I may do a full spoiler review of this (and all other five star books) because, quite frankly, I don’t want to stop talking about them after one post. But that’s for another day. In the meantime, please please please pick this up. I know it’s long. I know that can be intimidating. But I promise you won’t regret the investment. It’s a masterpiece.

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11/22/63 by Stephen King