![]() August thinks maybe it’s finally time to fit in and start to feel like she’s living a normal life, but then she meets a stunningly cute Chinese-American girl on the Q train. She finds a room in an apartment that comes with a delightful mix of found friends all also a part of the queer community, and they set her up with a job at the local diner. ![]() She’s now transferred to her third college, this time in Brooklyn, and she hopes it’ll stick. For more info, visit -four-year-old August has struggled to find her place in life. How remarkable then, that One Last Stop takes you to so many such spaces – apartments, drag bars, diners, and so many subway cars, tunnels and bridges – and lets the reader bask in the love that lives, is remembered, and is cultivated there.Ĭasey McQuiston will speak about One Last Stop with author Abby Jimenez in a BookPeople virtual event Monday, June 7, 6pm. It's a very particular feeling to be in a room where joy and community and good humor are all palpable. She pins down the moments when suddenly a house doesn't feel like a pit stop anymore, when the worries in your head that your friends don't really want to hang out with you die down a little, when you realize you made something really wonderful happen for somebody else because you know them so well. McQuiston manages to capture both the electricity of a crush – the tentatively flirty jokes, the leaning into body space, the way your friends can maddeningly read your face whenever you've been around the object of your affections – and the moment when, all of a sudden, the daydream you're infatuated with becomes a real, whole, complicated human being that you'd do almost anything for. Overwhelmingly, it's the slow burn discoveries and the risks we see the characters become brave enough to take that make One Last Stop such a moving and transportative read. McQuiston's ear for banter and sense of pacing are as keen as ever, and you'll find yourself surprised into both laughter and tears as the novel alternates between whirlwinds and moments you get to luxuriate in. (You'll be sending your friends a lot of screenshots of particular lines followed by an all-caps "WIFE" or "HUSBAND." Make peace with this.) Like its predecessor, Red, White & Royal Blue, One Last Stop wears its heart – by which I mean its deep investment in honoring both the joys and struggles of LGBTQIA history – on its sleeve. With a main household containing a reformed girl detective/diner waitress, an electrical engineer/visual artist, a genuine psychic/terrible bartender, and a disowned rich kid/tattoo artist (not to mention the protester/rambler/horny legend love interest), this is a book with one of the most captivating, hot, weird, and wonderful casts in recent memory. Jane and August move through the world very differently, even before you take into account their different native time periods, but they're both young women reckoning with profound loss and longing, presented with same proposition: Do you do the hard thing (choose to remember your past, look a little stupid, make yourself say how you feel for real, out loud) when all it might get you is heartbreak? But it's the magical wrinkle in this romance – the fact that Jane has been displaced in time from the 1970s and, oh, also can't leave the Q train lest she go full ghost – that makes the whole thing extraordinary. If that was it – girl moves to big city, klutzes her way into someone's heart, and learns to love again – One Last Stop would be a delight. That she meets the girl of her dreams – generous, tough, incorrigibly dimpled Jane Su – on the Q line she takes to and from school feels like New York trying to tell her something. That she lands an apartment above a Popeyes that comes pre-furnished with a fascinating, funny queer family might be dismissed as dumb luck. The aforementioned New Orleans native is trying to escape the missing persons case that dominated her childhood, finally finish her undergraduate degree, and find a city that will confirm her pessimism about trust and vulnerability. Our protagonist, August Landry, doesn't start out with that sunny of an outlook. Maybe the kitchen smells that cling to your clothes after your waitressing shift are a perfume. Maybe public transportation is a venue for meet-cutes and little moments of kindness. Casey McQuiston's second novel, which charts the love story of a closed-off recent Louisiana transplant and a butch punk heartthrob who is trapped on a subway line, has such warmth spilling out of it that suddenly everything you've dismissed as cliche about the city feels new and earned. Not that it's by any means the most important thing about it, but One Last Stop is incredible New York City propaganda.
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