The Long Way Home Review: Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 5, 2026

Verdict: A sincere small-town homecoming romance about two very different ways of surviving being gay in a conservative place, held back by a heroine whose judgement of closeted women grates on a loud share of its readers.

Best for: Readers who want a character-driven coming-out story with a college-town setting and a happy ending, and who can sit with a lead who is often wrong and slow to admit it.

Heat level: Not rated (romance.io band not confirmed)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.6/5 — a 3.88 Goodreads average across roughly 840 ratings, with the most repeated complaint aimed at the heroine herself)

Tropes: Small-town homecoming, opposites attract, coming out, closeted love interest, hometown reinvention, family estrangement, campus romance, found community.

The Long Way Home by Rachel Spangler is the first of her Darlington Romances, a contemporary lesbian romance published by Bold Strokes Books in 2010 and set in Darlington, Illinois — a small-town college community where Raine St. James, an out activist who built a public career on escaping the place, is forced back to teach, and where Beth Devoroux, the town’s beloved and closeted librarian, is the one who brought her.

It holds a 3.88 average across roughly 840 Goodreads ratings and about 60 written reviews, was a Golden Crown Literary Award (Goldie) finalist according to the author’s own site, and picked up a Bold Strokes audiobook in 2017. The rating looks steady, but the reviews split on one specific question — whether the book is on Raine’s side when she looks down on women who stay in the closet. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is The Long Way Home About?

The Long Way Home is a contemporary small-town romance with a coming-out story running through the middle of it. The small town here is neither a cosy backdrop nor a villain. It is the place that threw Raine out at seventeen and the same place that raised Beth, an orphan, with real affection. The question the book keeps asking is whether one town can be both of those things at once.

Raine is defined by what she walked away from. She left as Rory, rebuilt herself in Chicago as Raine, and made a living as a writer and speaker telling audiences how bad it was back home. A decade on, the work has dried up and she is broke, which is the only reason she takes a teaching job at Bramble University. Beth assumes she can stay safely hidden in a long-term relationship nobody in town knows about. The book is written in third person and moves between the two women, so the reader sees both strategies from the inside: loud and out, and quiet and hidden.

What Makes This Small-Town Lesbian Romance Work

Two coming-out stories, not one: The most consistent praise in the reviews is for how the book sets Raine’s way of being out against Beth’s way of staying hidden. Several readers say it made them think about their own families.
Raine versus Rory: The split between the public persona and the girl who left is the device readers single out most. Some find it moving and some find it overdone, but nearly everyone mentions it.
A town that changes its mind: Lesbrary’s reviewer singles out the book’s argument about rural acceptance, and the idea that small towns can grow is a real counterweight to the escape stories that dominate queer fiction.
Character growth on both sides: Readers credit both women with real arcs, and several say Spangler’s strength is building people rather than plot.
Sweet without being weightless: More than one reader praises the balance of angst and warmth. There is real hurt here, but the book does not wallow in it.

Book Synopsis

At seventeen, Rory St. James came out and lost her family for it. She left Darlington, Illinois, and never went back. In Chicago she became Raine and turned her escape into a career, standing in front of audiences and explaining exactly what was wrong with the place that raised her.

Ten years later the career has stalled. The bookings are gone, the money is gone, the relationship is over, and Raine is no longer the young voice audiences want to hear. When the only offer on the table is a teaching post at Bramble University, she takes it, even though it means moving back to the town she has spent a decade criticising in public. The woman who pushed for her hire is Beth Devoroux, a librarian who lost her parents young and was brought up by the whole community. Beth has a settled life, steady work, good friends and a partner — and nobody in Darlington knows about the partner.

Raine arrives braced for hostility and finds something more complicated: neighbours who remember Rory, a family who may or may not want her back, and a librarian whose quiet, careful life cuts against everything Raine believes about being out. Beth, for her part, cannot work out why the town’s loudest critic keeps getting under her skin. Each woman thinks the other has made the wrong choice about how to live. The question is whether either of them can admit what that choice has cost her.

My Review

The idea at the centre of this book is a good one, and it has aged better than parts of the execution. Most homecoming romances set up the big city as freedom and the small town as something to escape or be rescued from. Spangler asks a harder question. What if the woman who got out is as damaged by it as the woman who stayed in? Raine and Beth are not just opposites who attract. They are two answers to the same problem, and the romance works best when each one makes the other look at her own answer honestly.

The character work is the second real strength, and it is the thing the positive reviews name most. Raine is built carefully. Readers repeatedly call out the gap between the persona and the scared seventeen-year-old underneath. Beth’s caution is not played as cowardice; the book gives her real reasons for it. Lambda Literary’s reviewer says the ending will keep you up late.

Where it struggles is Raine herself, and this is not a stray complaint — it is the most repeated criticism in the reviews. In the reviews I could see, at least seven readers object to her sense of superiority over women who stay closeted, and several feel the book agrees with her for too long. Others accept that she is meant to be wrong but find her hard to like. Around that sit the secondary problems: the supporting cast is thin, with Beth’s girlfriend Kelly called two-dimensional and at least one side character dropping out of the story; three or more readers find the plot predictable; Lambda’s reviewer and Lesbrary’s both note repetition and over-explaining; and readers picking it up now describe it as dated, which for a 2010 book about the closet is partly just the world moving on.

One expectation to reset: older listings and some recommendation lists, including an earlier version of this page, call Raine a comedian. The publisher’s description, the Lambda review and the Goodreads summary all make her a writer, speaker and activist, and the book is closer to an issues-driven romance than a rom-com. If the cover sold you banter, calibrate. If “coming-out story” made you expect misery, relax — it ends happily.

My honest note: A thoughtful early Spangler with a smart premise and a heroine who will test your patience. If a judgemental lead ruins a romance for you, start with her later books. If you can let Raine be wrong until she isn’t, the payoff is genuine.

Element	In The Long Way Home
Central relationship	Raine St. James & Beth Devoroux — out activist returning home and closeted hometown librarian
Core tropes	Small-town homecoming, opposites attract, coming out, closeted love interest, family estrangement
Setting	Darlington, Illinois, and Bramble University — a small college town, with Chicago as the life Raine left behind
Heat level	Not rated — romance.io band not confirmed
Series	Darlington Romances book 1 — a standalone with a happy ending; later books are separate romances in the same town
Content notes	Family rejection of a gay teenager, homophobia, internalised homophobia, a closeted relationship, parental death in backstory, reconciliation with formerly rejecting parents

How Spicy Is The Long Way Home?

I have not scored the heat, because I could not confirm a romance.io steam band for The Long Way Home, and the reader reviews barely discuss it. None of the reviews I read describe the love scenes, praise them, or complain about them. That silence is informative in itself. Treat the intimacy as secondary to the emotional arc rather than as a selling point.

The element worth knowing in advance is not sexual at all. Beth is in a hidden relationship with Kelly when the story starts, so the attraction to Raine begins while she is still partnered — though no reviewer I found raises infidelity as a complaint. The other flag is the family thread: at least one one-star reader objects strongly to how the book handles Raine’s relationship with the parents who rejected her. For Spangler at a similar low-heat, feelings-first register, Heart of the Game is the closest match, and Second Verse sits at a low-heat level.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want a coming-out story at the centre of a romance, you like small towns that are allowed to be complicated, you enjoy flawed leads who are forced to grow, and you prefer emotional stakes to heat.

You may want to skip it if: a heroine who lectures closeted women will put you off, you need a strong supporting cast, you find reconciliation with homophobic parents hard to read, or you want contemporary banter rather than a 2010 issues romance.

In short: a smart premise and a real happy ending, delivered through a lead you will have to forgive before the book does.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

This is a quiet backlist title, and nothing about its readership is new. A web search surfaced no Reddit threads and no BookTok presence. What it does have is unusually good period coverage for a small-press romance: the Lambda Literary Review covered it on release in 2010, Lesbrary reviewed it, and The Lesbian Review also reviewed it. Its readership has built slowly to roughly 840 Goodreads ratings, most of them four stars — 39% at four stars, 27% at five, 26% at three, and only about 6% below that. The steady new readers come mainly from Spangler’s later and better-rated books sending people back to her start, and from the audiobook.

That audiobook arrived in spring 2017, narrated by Melody Muzljakovich and running about 7 hours 32 minutes; Spangler announced it on her blog as her first. Amazon’s listing shows 4.5 stars across 280 global ratings for all formats, which is noticeably warmer than the Goodreads reception.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The coming-out theme, first and most consistently — readers praise it for showing more than one way to come out, and several say they saw their own conservative families in it. Next comes character development, which is the phrase reviewers return to most. Raine’s split between Rory and Raine draws real admiration from the readers it works for. The romance gets called sweet, and readers credit Spangler with handling the angst without overdoing it. Danika at Lesbrary says the book turned her into a reader of lesbian romance. A few even rate it Spangler’s best.

What readers argue about and complain about: Raine’s superiority comes first. It is the single most repeated complaint. Readers object to her treating closeted women as lesser lesbians and to how long the book takes to push back on that. The second theme is that the book feels dated, which four or more readers raise, often in the same breath as the closet politics. Third, predictability and cliché, raised by at least three readers, alongside a thin supporting cast in which Kelly is a sketch rather than a person. A smaller group find the whole thing too light for its subject; one calls it fluff that plays the issues too safely. The genuine split is the family thread. Some readers find Raine’s reconciliation with her parents healing, while at least one finds it an unearned demand that a rejected child forgive.

The standalone question worth asking first: it resolves. The Darlington Romances are separate love stories sharing a town, and this one ends happily with nothing left hanging. If you want to keep going, Goodreads rates the later Darlington books higher than the first except for Spanish Heart (3.67): Timeless sits at 4.03 and Close to Home, a 2018 Lambda Literary Award finalist, at 4.00. Spangler’s most-read book, In Development, sits almost four tenths of a star higher at 4.26.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Long Way Home a standalone?

Yes. It is book one of Rachel Spangler’s Darlington Romances, but each book is a separate romance set in or connected to Darlington, Illinois. You need nothing else to read it.

Does The Long Way Home have a happy ending?

Yes. Raine and Beth get a happy resolution, and readers describe the ending as warm and earned. The only real debate about the ending is the family reconciliation, which some readers find too neat.

Is Raine a comedian?

No. Some listings describe her that way, but the publisher’s description and the reviews make her a writer, speaker and activist whose public career is built on criticising her hometown. She takes a teaching job at Bramble University when that career dries up.

How spicy is The Long Way Home?

Not rated here. We could not confirm a romance.io steam band, and reader reviews barely mention the intimate scenes. Readers treat the book as an emotional coming-out romance first.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes. It is narrated by Melody Muzljakovich for Bold Strokes Books, runs about 7 hours 32 minutes, and came out in spring 2017. Amazon shows 4.5 stars across 280 ratings for all formats, higher than the Goodreads average.

If You Loved The Long Way Home, Read These Next

For the same homecoming engine at a lighter, warmer temperature, Perfect Rhythm by Jae sends a burned-out pop star back to the small town she left and rates noticeably higher with readers. Second Verse by Natasha West returns two women to the hometown where they were teenage sweethearts, with a queer awakening at the centre instead of a closet. To see how far Spangler’s own craft travelled after this debut-era book, Edge of Glory is a good next step. If the hidden relationship is the part that hooked you, our secret relationship sapphic romance list collects more.

For more coming-home stories, browse our small-town lesbian romance list or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

The Long Way Home is a book whose idea is braver than its execution. The two-sided coming-out story is genuinely thoughtful, Darlington is a town allowed to be both cruel and kind, and both leads grow in ways readers find moving. It is also carried by a heroine whose contempt for the closet many readers cannot get past, a thin supporting cast and a plot most people will see coming. Whether the trade is worth it depends on how long you can stay patient with Raine. Readers who make it to the end get a sincere, complete romance with a real happy ending and the start of a whole town worth of books. Check The Long Way Home on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Long Way Home ranks as a sincere early-career small-town coming-out romance — thoughtful about the closet and generous to its town, held back by a judgemental heroine and a dated feel, and best approached for the two women’s arcs rather than for banter or heat.