One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston | ALC Review

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston, read by Natalie Naudus

• Publisher: Macmillan Audio, June 1st 2021
• Genre: Romance, Sci-Fi
• Format: Audiobook (ALC)
• Length: 12h 10m (432 pages)
• My Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)

Click on the cover for my review on Goodreads.

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AUDIOBOOK REVIEW

tl;dr: 23yo disaster bi + 24yo chinese american displaced from the 1970s; a lot of chaotic, mostly queer 20-somethings in nyc

One Last Stop is pure joy. CMQ has crafted a beautiful romance with a full cast of the loveliest characters ever existed. It is a perfect story of love, found family, connecting to one’s heritage, and finding oneself.

August Landry (23, bisexual) grew up trying to solve the missing person mystery of her uncle with her mom. At 23, she moves to NYC for college, hoping to finally find a home, only to end up in a sketchy apartment. But soon, she finds out that her roommates are incredibly friendly. Automatic friends. When she meets Jane Su (24, Chinese American) on the Q train her first day of school, she couldn’t get the friendly hot butch in a leather jacket and ripped jeans out of her head. And when she finds out Jane is stuck on the subway without much memory of her past, August decides to help Jane piece out the mystery and maybe send her back to the 1970s. But as they spend more time together, August isn’t sure she wants Jane to disappear in time again.

The story opens with August moving to a new city and her encountering with potential roommate Niko (24, trans, Latino), a tattooed young man with one dangling earring and a toothpick in his mouth, asking if he could touch her, but not in a weird way. He is a psychic and wants to read August’s energy. August doesn’t believe in that but lets him anyway. And that’s all it takes for them to become roommates.

It was a perfect opening for a story about the space-time anomaly that is Jane. Not only are we introduced to supernatural elements in the first chapter, we also get to meet the quirky roommates. So when August has a meet cute with the mysterious Jane on the Q train, the scene and feels are already perfectly set up. I also love that this is a new adult romance and that August is a complete disaster because, yes, that is very relatable.

Every single character in this book is wonderful. It’s wholesome and chaotic and amazing. There are no villains, only the sci-fi glitch that had Jane stuck on the Q train. Told entirely in August’s point-of-view, we have an unobstructed view of her thoughts. She is very dramatic and an absolute disaster. Set in 2020 and a world without the pandemic, Jane, always looking cool and forever kind, brings in pieces of historical fiction elements, the good and the bad of the past, the fights for queer rights, etc.

CMQ is unbelievably good at creating important, lovable, and delightful secondary characters: Niko the psychic, Myla (Black, with a Chinese adoptive mother) the sculptor with a degree in electrical engineering (as someone who also has degrees in EE, I am so happy to see this), Wes the brooding tattooist and architecture school dropout, and Isaiah/Annie the drag queen who is an accountant.

One Last Stop is the book that feels like drag shows and pride parades, where everyone is comfortable in their own skin, having fun, and mostly happy. The beautiful found family in which August finally feels she belongs in makes my heart soft.

I love everything about the mundane things the characters—not just August but also her flatmates—want for life. The little descriptions, the hope, the smallest dreams of wanting, of wanting to belong, of wanting love. It is these thoughts and comments that make the story so utterly pure. They live for joy, Niko and his psychic abilities, Myla and her obscure sculptures, Wes and his art. August started out as a non-believer of supernatural events and also cynical person who is socially awkward and doesn’t have friends. She probably didn’t even believes in friendship. But the queer found family she has of her roommates makes her believe again. It makes her believe that she deserves something nice, too, that she deserves love.

And places play important parts in the book, too. It isn’t just the big city of New York, but also the more personal locations, like the Q train, Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes, the Brooklyn apartment above a Popeye’s where August, Niko, Myla, and Wes live. There is a heavy emphasis on space, time, people in the story, and every single one of the elements is vividly presented throughout the writing.

Even though One Last Stop is mainly a romance between August and Jane, there are so many other important relationships, too: August and her mom Suzette, Suzette and her brother Auggie, Jane and her family, Wes and his estranged rich family, Niko and Myla, Wes and Isaiah, the employees at Billy’s, etc. All of them are complicated and real and intertwined.

I laughed so many times while listening to the audiobook and teared up from happiness. But most of the time, I just smiled as I listen to everything playing out. Everything is so cute and I badly wished these characters were real. And there is August and Jane. I love their dynamics of being tender yet passionate and playful, too. Oh, and the yearning. Fuck.

The incorporation of Jane’s Chinese heritage was very well done as far as I could tell. There are brief mentions of having fah sung thong during the new year, congee for breakfast, Chinese zodiacs, and a throwaway joke that makes sense in Chinese. Having all these details made Jane’s character even more solid, and I love everything about that.

Naudus did a superb job of bringing the story to life. For me, audiobooks are like movies but several hours long, played in the head however you wanted it to be played. And this audiobook built gorgeous scenes, each tiny detail registered, every hitch of breath audible.

One Last Stop has made me feel more alive than ever, to be here, now, tethered to this world. There are so much hope and dreams and it’s just beautiful from the beginning to the end. The love between August and Jane is phenomenal—it transcends time and space—and I want Niko and Myla to unofficially adopt me, too. It is a tribute to all the gay rights activists, queer disasters, and everyone in between. It is about feeling stuck and gathering the courage of getting unstuck, the process of slowly figuring things out, one step at a time, and it’s okay if nothing is certain, it’s okay if the present is the only thing you have. One Last Stop is so full of life and everyone has the purest soul. And one last warning: the Q train will never feel the same again after reading this story.

Content warnings: arson, missing person, death, bones (of frogs), off-page homophobia, off-page racism, off-page transphobia

I received an advanced listener’s copy from MacMillan Audio via NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving a review.

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