And so, in her first month in the apartment on the corner of Flatbush and Parkside above the Popeyes, August learns that the Q is a time, a place, and a person.

One Last Stop

For cynical twenty-three-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don’t exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone. She can’t imagine how waiting tables at a 24-hour pancake diner and moving in with too many weird roommates could possibly change that. And there’s certainly no chance of her subway commute being anything more than a daily trudge through boredom and electrical failures.

But then, there’s this gorgeous girl on the train.

Jane. Dazzling, charming, mysterious, impossible Jane. Jane with her rough edges and swoopy hair and soft smile, showing up in a leather jacket to save August’s day when she needed it most. August’s subway crush becomes the best part of her day, but pretty soon, she discovers there’s one big problem: Jane doesn’t just look like an old school punk rocker. She’s literally displaced in time from the 1970s, and August is going to have to use everything she tried to leave in her own past to help her. Maybe it’s time to start believing in some things, after all.

One Last Stop was my most anticipated novel of 2021, and it does not disappoint. The book follows August, a closed-off girl in her early twenties. She’s a loner and has lived her life bouncing from one place to the next, being perfectly content to never call a place home. But when she moves to New York, she finds herself doing something she’s spent her life trying to escape: putting down roots. She moves into an apartment with roommates that adopt her into their makeshift family, she gets a job at a pancake house, she even buys furniture for the first time in her memory. 

And then there’s Jane, the charming and mysterious girl from the Q train who quickly becomes the best part of August’s day. But there’s a problem. Jane is stuck on the train displaced in time from the 1970s with no memory of how she got that way. Now, August must use the skills she reluctantly gained as a child to solve the mystery that is Jane while also managing her growing feelings. 

While One Last Stop is a gorgeous, slow-burn romance, it is also a mystery. August and Jane’s developing relationship was a joy to read, but what hooked me was the circumstances around how Jane got stuck on the Q. I was on the metaphorical edge of my seat until the very end, wondering how the mystery would play out. 

The book also is an exploration into queer history and what it means to be queer. I’ve seen a few reviews say that where Red, White & Royal Blue is about being queer on a more personal scale, One Last Stop is about being queer on a more global scale, and I’d have to agree. There were moments where I felt like the elements of queer history could have been a little more nuanced, but I read those moments as being gaps in August’s understanding of things, so overall I think it was handled well. 

Red, White & Royal Blue is my favorite book of all time, so I fully expected to fall in love with Casey McQuiston’s sophomore novel. One Last Stop still has many of the same elements that made me fall in love with Red, White & Royal Blue. The element of found-family is strong, the characters are hilarious, diverse, and well developed, and the prose was lyrical and guaranteed to make you run through a gambit of feelings. But that is where the similarities end. One Last Stop is its own story, and I actually loved how different it is.