Review: One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

ARC from the publisher through NetGalley, all thoughts are my own!

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston follows August, an NYC student moving into a new apartment and trying to process her tumultuous past with her single mother, whose life focus has been to locate her brother, who has been missing longer than August has been alive. The book takes a speculative twist when August meets Jane, a gorgeous Asian-American woman who seems to be unstuck from time and trapped on the Q train.

I was absolutely bananas excited for this book, and I am sure it will be a knockout for some readers, but I am very torn about my own feelings around the book. I really found August to be an interesting main character; I liked reading about how she processed her childhood, and I thought her lens of the world was a great one to be the main focus of this story. I did feel at times in the book that her voice was a bit muddled and hard to find; it seemed to almost slip into an omniscient narration and not the close focus on who August is.

I found the pacing of this book to be my biggest hurdle, you meet Jane in the first chapter, but her storyline following takes quite a while to get going, which was frustrating in a romantic comedy. The book has a huge cast of characters, which will be a plus to some readers, I am sure, but I found it difficult to keep track of everyone. I kept having to go back and check to see who was who. I felt like I needed more time to establish each additional person before we added new folks. I eventually gave up and just tried to go with the flow, and if I didn't remember who someone was, that is fine.

I don't think the relationship really gets enough page time. So much is happening to support the speculative (I totally viewed it as a fantasy element, but the explanation might lie closer to science fiction?) element of the story outside of the Q train that the relationship between August and Jane didn't get enough time for me to spend with the two of them. Some of their interaction are presented as recaps of what has been happening, little lists that did not serve my reading experience very well. I wanted more time with the two; I wanted more banter. McQuiston wrote a scenario that could have become incredibly repetitive, and while it didn't do that, it still didn't really succeed for me.

This brings me to the underlying issue I had with this whole book. I do not like the way the speculative element was handled. I did not like its introduction, August is presented to the reader as a skeptic, but she wholeheartedly accepts all supernatural elements introduced to her life with almost no actual push back. This seemed like poor characterization to further the plot. As the story progressed, I mostly just imagined how much I would have really liked this book if only this element was not a part of it. I personally thought it detracted more than it added, Jane being from the past, was used to tie different plot elements together, but I think McQuiston could have written a similar story without this part. The plot felt very constructed to make Jane from the past necessary, instead of making it seem natural that Jane was from the past. The '70s felt like a costume Jane was wearing; I wanted so much more from the being unstuck in time element. I found the conclusion of the speculative element rushed and convenient and confusing. It was explained too in-depth for me to be fine with the magical force does magical things vibe we had at the end, but still managed to be confusing.

I didn't like the way Jane's story concluded. The book spent a lot of time talking about her past and her family and how she wanted the opportunity to reconnect to everyone she left behind and I was kind of devastated for her. I maybe would have enjoyed this book more if we had been in Jane’s point of view, at least for some of it. I was so interested in her emotions and kind of felt like they were glossed over at times.

Other issues I had with this book were just generally not finding the book funny, I found a lot of the side characters to be more an amalgam of quirky traits than fleshed-out character, and I don't fully understand why August was the only person who had been able to save Jane in all this time. I also wanted more tension between August's 'real-life' and her one on the train, it made no sense to me that August would have so few repercussions for skipping so much work and school.

That seems like I really hated this book but I didn't. The writing is easy to read, when the book didn't drag it was very fun to read. I liked Jane and August's interactions on the whole, they were a fun couple to read about. I really enjoyed the parts of the book set at the place August worked, and I liked the exploration of August's relationship with her mother. I don't think the book is bad, I just thought the book had too much going on and I personally didn't like the way the speculative element was handled.

I gave this book 3 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I would recommend this book to folks who liked Red, White and Royal Blue, it is obviously written by the same person and I would want people to decide for themselves if they enjoyed McQuiston's sophomore work, also to anyone looking for queer found family, or to those who like a touch of magic added to normal life (maybe it will work better for you than it did for me!). I plan on reading McQuiston's third book (and buying this book on June 1st when it is available) whenever that may come, I do hope it doesn't have any speculative elements but I loved their first book so much that I am still interested in following their career!