Book Review: Come Home to My Heart by Riley Redgate
Come Home to My Heart by Riley Redgate
Published: May 6th 2025 by Union Square & Co.
Rating: ★★★★ (4 stars)
Genres: Young Adult // Contemporary Romance, LGBT
Quick Thoughts: Bravely tender, delicately romantic and bursting with heart. The story as a whole is heavy and heartbreakingly raw, but will be exceptionally meaningful, especially to LGBTQIA+ readers. Riley has written something so distinctly emotional, and I adored every page.
I was gifted this book via the Publisher. There was no obligation to post/give this book a certain rating. All views are my own. I remain entirely impartial.
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Reader Information: View Content Warnings.
TW: this book contains references of religious trauma, trauma relating to coming out, homelessness and mental health. 14+.
Opposites
Unexpected Connection
Homelessness
Religious Trauma
About This Book:
Gloria Forman and Xia Harper go to the same high school in a small South Carolina town, but they couldn’t be more different. While Gloria is part of the popular, Christian crowd, Xia sleeps through class, antagonizes anyone who dares talk to her, and buries herself in books that help her pretend she’s somewhere else—anywhere that being lesbian wouldn’t be a waking nightmare.
When the two form an accidental friendship, they begin noticing each other in ways they promised themselves they’d avoid. After all, Xia’s isolation is self-imposed for a reason, and the last thing Gloria needs is more upheaval, especially after her parents kicked her out of the house for being gay. Ever since, she has spent her nights under the stage in the school auditorium and her days terrified of being discovered.
Xia just wants to keep her head down until the end of senior year. Gloria just wants to keep her living situation quiet until her parents come around. But as their feelings for each other intensify and the truths they’ve hidden work their way to the surface, what they truly want will change forever.
First Thoughts
I loved Final Draft by Riley back in 2018, so when Union Square & Co reached out with an offer to read Come Home to My Heart early, I leapt at the chance. Not only because I knew I gelled with Riley’s writing style, but because I am a sucker for a book that I know is going to rip my heart out or/as well make me bawl.
My Review
Xia and Gloria are polar opposites. Gloria is a popular girl, part of the Christian/Religious crowd in their small Southern Carolina town. Xia, on the other hand, is a keep-to-herself kind of girl, trying to keep her head down and out of the buzz of being social or drawing awareness to herself. Dealing with some very unresolved trauma tied to her sexuality is the last thing Xia wanted senior year, and so she’s trying to push through it the only way she knows how—engrossing herself in books and things that transport her mind and body somewhere else entirely, simultaneously pushing away anyone or anything that dares to interpose her avoidance.
Gloria, too, is going through her own trauma related to her sexuality. Kicked out of her house for coming out as gay means that she spends her nights underneath the school auditorium stage, hiding from plain sight, hoping her parents come around and accept her. Only, when the two of them form an unlikely and incidental friendship one day, they crack one another open in a way neither expected. Their bond is fortified by mirrored trauma, although in different ways, and though they shouldn’t be compatible, their feelings beg to differ. Soon, they’re unravelling their own truths side-by-side, revealing potential for themselves to have things—feel things—their hearts want. But when the obscured truth isn’t so hard to see through, what does allowing it to break the surface mean for them?
Overall, Come Home To My Heart was bravely tender, delicately romantic and bursting with heart. Xia and Gloria were these complex, yet understandably fragile characters that had the world on their shoulders, which echoed through their lives and choices. Riley wrote them in this special, candid way that allowed me as the reader to understand them and who they were beneath the facades they projected. The connection they forged was indisputable, and it showed in the way their alternating POVs spoke about one another that the bond was not only reciprocated tenfold but unwaveringly strong. The story as a whole is heavy and heartbreakingly raw, but will be exceptionally meaningful, especially to LGBTQIA+ readers who might see Xia and Gloria’s lives reflected in their own. Riley has written something so distinctly emotional for the found family lovers, and I adored every page. (And to know that a portion of the profits of Come Home To My Heart goes to the rising increase of homelessness of young people, often LGBTQIA+ youth, is so incredible.)
RATING:
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Happy Reading!
