One Last Stop, by Casey McQuiston

One Last Stop is a sweet, funny, heartfelt romance with a lightly paranormal/sci-fi twist, by the author of Red, White, and Royal Blue. Twenty-three year old August has just moved to New York City, transferring colleges for the third time and renting a room in an apartment shared by a colourful group of housemates she has no intention of becoming friends with. Due to some quirks in her childhood — August’s mother has spent most of her life trying to track down a missing person — August has never really learned the knack of making friends. But, as you might expect, that begins to change over the course of the novel, especially when she meets a mysteriously attractive girl on the subway.

This is a sweet queer romance, a bit of a time-travel story (though not quite), and a story about friendship, chosen families, and finding your own place in the world. The only thing that struck an odd note with me was the time setting of the story. Just released in June 2021, the novel was obviously well underway before the pandemic began, but it’s set in 2020. Even if most of the writing was finished a year ago, there certainly would have been time in editing for McQuiston to make the tiny tweak of moving the story’s action back to 2018 or 2019 (it’s a very contemporary story, but a year or two earlier wouldn’t have hurt it). Instead, it’s set in New York City during the one year in contemporary history when most of the story’s events – which unfold in busy restaurants, on crowded subways, at parties, at bars, at drag shows — literally could not have happened. One possible answer to the “how do we write about 2020?” problem is, of course, to just pretend it didn’t happen, and that’s the route McQuiston has taken here. That’s fine, of course — she’s already playing with reality by creating a story in which someone could be stuck on a subway for over 40 years — but when I realized that the story began in fall 2019, as the months progressed I was bracing myself for a story with NYC in lockdown and August unable to leave her apartment and ever find Jane on the subway again. It was kind of a relief that that didn’t happen, but a little weird. However, that tiny temporal weirdness did not at all diminish my pleasure in this sweet, heartwarming coming of age story.