One Last Stop

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martins Press for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A bit more than 4 stars - a fun read. I just read “Red, White, and Royal Blue” a few weeks ago which I loved and so that may have raised my expectations too much/I was expecting something that couldn’t be delivered. But this was still fun and fast paced and kept me hooked. There is so much going on here and so many characters with so many layers that I just loved. It really did give a feeling of “home” even though I would NEVER consider a city home. I love McQuiston’s descriptions, they really make you feel what the atmosphere (physically and emotionally) are like. Plus some of the phrasing is freaking hilarious.

August Landry has yanked herself out of New Orleans and her single mother's orbit and bounced from college to college, amassing student loan debt and never feeling at home anywhere. When she arrives in Brooklyn, she lucks into three roommates - Niko, Myla, and Wes - and a job at Pancake Billy's House of Pancakes. She even meets "Subway Girl" on the Q train during her commute to class, and is lucky enough to run into her again. Subway Girl - Jane - has tattoos and a '70s aesthetic; she wears ripped jeans, red converse, and a black leather jacket over a white t-shirt, and she listens to cassette tapes. Soon, August realizes that Jane has been riding the Q for 45 years; she is somehow tethered to the line, was unaware of time passing, and show more has little memory of her life before.

August dives into research mode. She spent most of her life assisting her mother try to locate her missing older brother, Augie, who disappeared in the '70s. But August isn't able to find much about Jane's past; what works instead is triggering sense memories with food, music...and kissing. As August works to free Jane from the Q and send her back to the '70s, she denies that what she really wants is for Jane to stay here in the present, with her. The truth is, no one knows what will happen to Jane when they try to recreate the conditions of the '77 blackout that got her stuck in the first place, but during a drag queen fundraiser party to save Billy's/MTA heist, they're going to find out.

A love story featuring drag shows, pancakes, a psychic, and a quirk of time and electricity, and most of all, the connections between people.

Quotes

Truth is, when you spend your whole life alone, it's incredibly appealing to move somewhere big enough to get lost in, where being alone looks like a choice. (13)

Part of being a Brooklyn institution...is collecting all the New York strangeness at the end of the night like a pool filter full of june bugs. (51)

"You and I come at subtlety from very different directions." (Niko to August, 89)

"If you open a door, anything can come through it." (Niko, 94)

That's the way it happens on the subway - you lock eyes with someone, you imagine a life from one stop to the next, and you go back to your day as if the person you loved in between doesn't exist anywhere but on that train. (104)

It's easy to know who you are when you chose once and never changed your mind. (158)

If she absolutely has to have feelings, she can at least do it in private. (173)

"Everywhere I went, someone loved me. But everywhere I went, someone hated me." (Jane to August, 197)

She kept running, because she never quite learned what home was supposed to feel like. (199)

She's great at taking notes and picking apart facts, but she's never been good at navigating the rivers of feelings that run beneath. (204)

"Maybe no good timing means there's no bad timing either." (Niko, 208)

"Sometimes the point is to be sad, August. Sometimes you just have to feel it because it deserves to be felt." (Myla, 345)

"You gotta make your own place to belong." (Pancake Billy, 393) show less

Wow. I absolutely loved this book. Let me count the ways...

1. I love how it's written. How real the characters feel - funny and loving and sad and flawed, without ever being annoying or things getting too cringey. I love the world - all the big and little details that let me really see everything, and care about these places, without anything feeling like filler, like spending entire pages on what a wall looks like (I hate when books do that). Well timed, fun pop culture references, but not too many. A really easy read, but I had to look up the occasional word (it's good to learn new words!). The sci-fi elements get fully explained, but in a way that's easy for people who aren't really into that stuff to understand. Very genuinely funny show more - only book I've ever read to have me actually smiling and laughing out loud! The way the characters thoughts and feelings are described is great - never feels too heavy handed, and sometimes things I've felt before but never knew how to describe were put into words. Love that.

2. The characters and plot. I love magic, and I love gay stuff, lmao. There's a great love story, there's more than one intriguing mystery, there's a story of found family, and of biological family troubles. The characters aren't flawless in appearance (I adore the main character swooning over a crooked tooth). The main character is so relatable in the way she fantasizes and builds things up in her head. The roommates that I thought were going to be cringe tropes actually quickly appeared fully realized and really sweet. I loved the bits of history, and that the story touches on what it was like to be gay in the 70's for our main love interest. This is a story about a found family of mostly queer people, as opposed to a queer couple living amongst mostly straight family and friends. It's not super common for everyone, but that is the reality for a lot of people, and maybe the dream for a lot of people, and I liked that that was the case here. Homophobia isn't unrealistically ignored, but it's not a focus or main plot point either. I loved the main couple and was always rooting for them.

3. Miscellaneous: I love the gorgeous cover. I loved that through the book I felt seen, heartbroken, and inspired. I love the author's beautiful acknowledgements at the end that made me cry.

Sure I could have some nitpicks. I don't love chapters this long, I didn't necessarily want a particular storyline wrapped up in the way it was, and I felt there were some little things that didn't make sense (like she forgot her journal at home but not her pen, so she writes on her hand, when she could just use her phone?). These and a few others are all so minor though, they weren't really worth mentioning.
I guess that's how you know when you really love something- when any flaws you noticed or felt along the way ultimately don't mean anything. It's still one of my favourite books of all time now anyways. I adore it, I'm so thankful to Casey McQuiston for it, and I recommend it highly. show less

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
🌶🌶 /4

I took WAY too long to read more of Casey’s books after loving RWRB so much…. I’m so glad I finally did.

August has grown up with a mother who is on a constant search for her long missing uncle. In a world full of cold cases and facts, August doesn't believe in love or letting magic color your life. That is, until she moves to Brooklyn and falls for a girl she sees one day on the Q train.

As August starts to finally set down some roots, make some true friends, and make a life for herself in NYC, she learns more about Q train girl, Jane. The more she learns, the more she has to start accepting that sometimes magical and fantastical things can't be explained with cold hard facts. But that show more taste of magic is what makes life worth living.

Jane is somehow from the 1970s, and has gotten stuck outside of time, trapped on the Q train. As August gets to know Jane, she tries to solve the mystery of how Jane got there... and starts to catch feelings in the process.

As August and her friends try to free Jane from the Q, we follow along on the roller coaster of joy and love and rainbow technicolor that is the NYC queer scene. Through August's eyes, we discover the magic that can be found in finding people who don't just accept you for who you truly are, but who love you for it.

Dive into this story of friendship and love, it's worth the ride. And hey, if you've ever been to NYC... you'll never see the Q train the same way again 😉 show less

August is a 20-something college student newly transplanted from NOLA to NYC, trying to make the city feel like her home while also keeping her personal walls firmly in place. And then she spills coffee all down the front of her shirt on the way to her first class, meets the girl of her dreams on the subway, who gives August her scarf to cover up the stain, and falls instantly in love. What follows is one of the coolest love stories I've read in a long time, involving accidental/electrically-induced time travel, clairvoyant roommates, an accountant drag queen neighbor, and lots of pop tarts and pancakes. Like McQuiston's [Red, White, and Royal Blue], this novel is full of the cleverest kind of dialogue, which on several occasions made show more me laugh out in pure glee. There are also at least two mysteries unfolding in the story, with twists I couldn't see coming, and I was rooting for every single character from start to wholly-satisfying end. In short, it was fantastic and fabulous on lots of levels; Reader, it's absolutely safe to say that I am officially a McQuiston fan. show less

Okay so, if you are thinking of reading this because you absolutely loved her first book "Red, White, Royal Blue" and are expecting this to be that but sapphic, you will be very very disappointed like I was. The diversity in this book is wonderful and the amazing side characters are its main saving grace. The two main characters are really dull and it has one of my most hated romance tropes of instalove. The basic premise is a love story between a discount store Veronica Mars and a Chinese lesbian from the 70s who got glitched into present day because of a huge electricity surge on a train line that should have killed her but didn't so she's stuck on the subway for 45 years. The first half of the book literally felt like 45 years and I show more pushed on mostly out of sheer stubbornness. It feels like the author just really wanted to write lesbian train sex, which ngl was hot but not hot enough for the reading slump I nearly fell into. It's a 2.5 stars read I've generously bumped up to 3 just because the side characters were really fabulous. show less

I wasn't expecting that.

here are my emotions because--my god--I can't form thoughts right now.

I went into this pretty blind, thinking this would an interesting meet-cute and time-slip combo. Nothing to make me cry over right?

Wrong

Now, I cried hard at this book--something I wasn't expecting I'd ever do soon.

I also didn't expect the masterfully done themes and characters to make me feel things I've repressed for a long time. This book gave me enough anxiety to spend the last two chapters shivering between tears. It gave me enough hope to look at myself in a positive light--something I've been suffering about. This book broke my heart--and it mended it all a couple of pages later.

I haven't felt this connected to a book in a long while. show more When I put it down I really felt like I was missing a part of myself that I had only just now realized the existence of. show less