One Last Stop

Starred review from January 11, 2021
McQuiston’s joyful sophomore romp mixes all the elements that made Red, White & Royal Blue so outstanding—quirky characters, coming-of-age confusion, laugh-out-loud narration, and hilarious pop-cultural references (“Bella Swan, eat your horny little Mormon heart out”)—into something totally its own. At 23, August Landry moves to Brooklyn with few belongings but heaps of emotional baggage from a childhood spent helping her conspiracy theorist mother work to track down a long-missing relative. She is, as her new roommate puts it, “a reformed girl detective,” and she’s jaded and bitter enough to earn the title. But before long she finds herself falling for Jane Su, a punk lesbian she sees everyday on her commute. Jane’s circumstances are also far from ordinary: she’s from the 1970s, displaced in time by a mysterious event. Worse, she’s stuck on the bizarrely malfunctioning Q line, doomed to ride the Subway forever in an amnesiac’s fog—unless August can find a way to rescue her. Together with her found family of queer misfits, August sets out to save Jane and find herself. With all the fun and camp of a drag show (of which this novel features more than one) but grounded in the tenderness of first love, this time-slip rom-com is an absolute delight. McQuiston brings the goods. Agent: Sara Megibow, KT Literary.