Review: One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

One Last Stop is a lighthearted romance with a difference. One of the characters is lost in time. When twenty-three year old August moves to New York City, she's not expecting much. She's never been very popular and she's pushing her way through college and college transfers for no other reason than she doesn't really know what else to do with her life. Then her new housemates turn out to be absolutely lovely, even if their shared apartment is a bit of a dump. And she finds work straight away, at a quirky pancake joint. And last, but definitely not least, she finds herself falling for the cute girl that she spots on the train. There's something mysterious about the quirky, old school punk Jane Su, but nothing could prepare August for the discovery that Jane is caught in a time loop and has been stuck riding on the same train line since the 1970s. Can August find a way to save her?

Although I loved the concept of this one and it had some very cute moments, I felt that the storytelling dragged and the novel felt far longer than it needed to be. August's situation made for a great escapist read--about a lonely girl who moves to the big city and finds her place in the world. And Jane's situation of being in a time loop was certainly intriguing and gave the book an extra boost. But as I said, it felt a bit too long. And a little bit too wholesome in places. (Note to authors: it's okay to give characters flaws that are just flat out annoying, instead of cute. It's what makes them relatable.) I think I would have enjoyed it more if it was a novella, or even if we got to know more about Jane, whose actual name is Biyu, earlier in the novel. Which brings me to another point. I would have loved to have known more about Biyu/Jane's life and the discrimination that she would have undoubtably faced on the grounds of her race and sexuality in the 1970s, and how she handled that. 

While this one did not live up to my expectations, One Last Stop will probably be enjoyed by readers who want a quirky, escapist read with a slow burn romance.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more