Jenna Bush Hager says “Buckeye” by Patrick Ryan, her September 2025 Read With Jenna pick, is a “once-in-a-decade novel.”
“You read it once and then, even though it’s 500 pages, want to reread again,” she says.
The story is set in the small town of Bonhomie, Ohio, “basically over a lifetime” — from the start of World War II to the end of the Vietnam War.
“We meet two families whose lives intersect in ways that upon Page 1 you could never expect. We watch as America changes and these two families’ lives change,” Jenna says.
“I underlined so many parts of this book to share as inspiration. I fell in love with these characters,” she says.
In the book, Bonhomie locals Margaret Salt and Cal Jenkins come together briefly during the exuberance of the Allied victory in Europe. Jenna says what came next made her cry.
“Not only because it’s super emotional — anyone who has ever loved a child or a partner will feel that way. I cried because I was going to miss these characters so very much. I would recommend this book to anybody,” she says.
Speaking to TODAY.com, the author says the book was inspired by the town where his father and paternal grandmother were from — and a situation she was in.
Ryan learned something about his grandma’s past that sparked the idea for a book: His grandmother had had an affair with a married man who lived a few blocks away. He wondered how that would shape a person’s life.
“What I quickly realized was I had no interest in writing about her or my family in any way. I just started with the idea of someone in that situation,” he says.
Enter Margaret’s character, who has a brief affair with a neighbor. Then, he started wondering about her counterpart.
“Naturally I started thinking, ‘Who’s his fan? What’s his deal?’ The questions expanded both forward and back in terms of chronology and characters’ lives. Where did they come from? What did I want their arcs to be?”
He planned on a story that took place over one month, but the idea kept ballooning.
“No, actually, I think that I want to write about two generations of this family, and I want to write about consequences and deception and betrayal,” he says.
A short-story writer by trade, he constantly felt like he had “bit off more than he could chew,” he says.
Ryan says the novel took six years to complete, plus two more years of edits. He says hearing that his book had been chosen for Read With Jenna was “inconceivable” and something he “doesn’t know how to describe.”
“I worked on it for eight years. To do that you have to let go of the idea of any kind of reward. You just have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty — try not to think about approval and any kind of badge or gold star,” he says.
Ryan says he’s been writing since he was 20. He’s written things that “didn’t pan out” and novels he put away, which he calls “learning curves.”
“The only way I found to keep going over the years in the face of that kind of adversity was to let go of this idea of the prize and keep telling myself, ‘You’re doing this because you love to do it,’” he says.
While he wrote “Buckeye,” he looked at a note taped to his desk in his own handwriting: “No one asked you to write.”
“That was how I had to be, and that was — that was how I got through. And so then to have that news come along, it was just nothing but happy tears. I just sort of cried happily,” he says.