one last stop
Sometimes love stops you in your tracks.
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 her 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 an epic, big-hearted romance where the impossible becomes possible as August does everything in her power to save the girl lost in time.
content warnings: includes mild spoilers
ONE LAST STOP is a joyful, messy story about falling in the kind of love that breaks the laws of time. It’s also about queer communities past and present, how we find homes in one another, and the things we struggle with—now and throughout history. Jane Su (the love interest of the book) is a Chinese American butch lesbian who spent her twenties in the gay, punk, and anti-war scenes of the 1970s, and those experiences shaped who she is. A lot of her journey in this book is about rediscovering those memories, which means we hear about some ugly moments in the past.
By no means does any of this diminish the joy of OLS. It’s still very much a romantic comedy. Specifically, it’s a queer romantic comedy, and like every queer person’s story, it’s complicated. All of these things carry our characters through to their happy endings, and they have hundreds of moments of being loved and deliriously happy in between. Trust me.
I’ve divided this list of content warnings into things that actually feature on the page in the book and things that are recounted or discussed on-page but happened long before August and Jane’s story. As always with content warnings, there are mild-to-moderate spoilers in here, so proceed with caution if you’d rather go in spoiler-free.
One more thing before I get into it: like RWRB, OLS is an adult/new adult romance (characters aged 23-27). It features a fair bit of adult content (yes, including sex scenes). While this is pretty standard for the genre, I know I have some crossover readership, and I don’t want any readers to be surprised by what’s on the page.
On-page: Drinking, light drug use (weed), semi-public sex, exploration of depression and anxiety, memory loss and cognitive issues, familial estrangement, familial death, grief, missing persons, implied PTSD
Off-page, past, and alluded to: Homophobic violence and hate speech, police violence, the AIDS crisis, racism, childhood neglect, arson, historic hate crime resulting in loss of life (highlight for big spoiler: specifically the UpStairs Lounge Fire)