Kicking off the Pride releases’ season the right way, with our reviews of an absolute gem, a sapphic time-travel rom-com of your dreams. One Last Stop hits all the spots for a perfect book.
And as an extra treat, apart from the mix you can listen to while reading the book, we want to offer you one more thing: Charlotte actually set up a bot that will start tweeting in mid June, to avoid spoilers.
Cynical twenty-three-year old August doesn’t believe in much. She doesn’t believe in psychics, or easily forged friendships, or finding the kind of love they make movies about. And she certainly doesn’t believe her ragtag band of new roommates, her night shifts at a 24-hour pancake diner, or her daily subway commute full of electrical outages are going to change that.
But then, there’s Jane. Beautiful, impossible Jane.
All hard edges with a soft smile and swoopy hair and saving August’s day when she needed it most. The person August looks forward to seeing on the train every day. The one who makes her forget about the cities she lived in that never seemed to fit, and her fear of what happens when she finally graduates, and even her cold-case obsessed mother who won’t quite let her go. And when August realizes her subway crush is impossible in more ways than one—namely, displaced in time from the 1970s—she thinks maybe it’s time to start believing.
Casey McQuiston’s One Last Stop is a sexy, big-hearted romance where the impossible becomes possible as August does everything in her power to save the girl lost in time.
One Last Stop
Casey McQuiston
Rep: bi mc with anxiety, Chinese American lesbian li, gay side character, Black sapphic side character, Black gay side character, Puerto Rican American trans side character, Black pan side character
CWs: past homophobic violence, off page death
Release: 1st June 2021
Charlotte’s Review
There are some authors you can open the book of and just know you will be welcomed. Casey McQuiston is one of those. Their books are love letters to the LGBT community — you know that you can open them up and know that they will treat you kindly. And that’s so distinctly the case with One Last Stop.
At the centre of the book, much like with Red, White and Royal Blue but with fewer older adults, is a found family. August arrives in New York and ends up renting with Niko, Myla and Wes. There, on the way to class one day, she meets Jane on the Q Train. Only Jane cannot seem to get off that particular subway train and, when the subway is in danger of being shut down for works, she and her flatmates contrive to rescue Jane from metro purgatory.
Frankly, the power of this book rests in its narrative of finding a family. August at the start of the book makes a point of saying she only has a handful of boxes’ worth of belongings. But as she’s almost co-opted into the family, she finds herself possessing more and more. Which also parallels the people she gathers close to her along the way. It starts as her and her mother versus the world, but then there’s Niko and Myla and Wes and Isaac, and her co-workers at the greasy spoon where she finds a job. She’s not ever looking for them, really: it’s a bit like she blinks and suddenly she has a family where she didn’t expect to find one.
And then there’s Jane.
One thing I love about Casey McQuiston’s work is their ability to bring in LGBT history. In Red, White and Royal Blue, it was with the letters. Here, it’s through Jane. It’s an acknowledgement that we have always existed, that there’s a continuity through time. And here, there’s a part of it that’s like this is what we fought through to get here. It’s lovely to read that in a contemporary, really.
And, okay, so I kind of hated the science (call it a low tolerance threshold for bullshit), but that was so overpowered by how much I loved the rest of it. McQuiston’s characters are loveable and — trite as it may sound — relatable too. There isn’t a single one of them you won’t love entirely.
And once you’ve finished the book, you’ll feel an urgent need to reread it right away. Which, let’s be honest, is exactly how it should be.
Anna’s Review
I am once again crying about fictional lesbians. Actually Jane Su is the fictional lesbian, she’s the book girlfriend, she’s the blueprint. This is really all for her. I’m not in a group chat called “Dicks out for Jane Su” for nothing.
This of course is not to say that other parts of the book don’t work. In fact, they work perfectly well. If you’re not expecting exact science from this time-travel book, that is… It’s not about science, it’s about people coming together and loving each other with their whole hearts.
Yes, this is a romance. And it might actually be one of the best f/f romances to ever enter the mainstream. There are multiple reasons why I say that, but the most important one is the intensity of emotions and feelings between August and Jane. It’s not usual for sapphic books to allow their characters to be, well frankly, more than a cute aesthetic. Unlike m/m romances, the ones starring sapphic characters tend to be more soft and delicate, and tend to focus on how sweet it is that those people love each other, and not so much on the fact that they’re horny.
One Last Stop doesn’t have those hesitations, it explores all sides of the relationship between August and Jane. It uses the same kind of focus and detail to talk about August yearning after Jane, as it does to talk about August finding Jane hot and desirable. I mean, for the love of god, August literally keeps a journal of all the sex things she wants to try with Jane. Name one other mainstream sapphic book doing it like that.
But it’s not just a romance. It’s also a story about people loving each other in various different ways. It’s a story about found family, which is frankly a quintessential kind of story for LGBT folks. This idea that we will always find each other, and we will always understand each other, and support each other. That is a very definition of the found family. And is portrayed in the most beautiful way in One Last Stop. It works so well because the characters are fleshed out to the extent that they truly do feel like real people.
And because literally the whole cast is LGBT, Casey provided for themself a great opportunity to talk about our community. It doesn’t come across as a history lesson, but at times that’s what it essentially is. And given how little we ourselves know about the LGBT people who came before us, it’s actually an excellent choice. It also helps that Jane is from the 70s’ and provides a whole other perspective on the community.
I initially said that One Last Stop is “a gay history lesson wrapped up in a found family wrapped up in a romcom wrapped up in, once again!, a love letter to the LGBT community” and I was right. It’s also a gift to sapphics everywhere.
So, have we convinced you that you want to read this book?
One Comment
Anthony Bidulka
I agree, always nice to get some history or education while being entertained.