Book #263 of 2021:
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
This novel hasn’t quite grabbed my heart as fiercely as author Casey McQuiston’s earlier Red, White & Royal Blue, but it’s still a pretty great story with incredible levels of queer representation. That includes not only the bi protagonist’s F/F romance, but also her found family of LGBT friends and multiple scenes at drag balls and brunches. Like a lot of fiction set in New York City, it reads as a bit of a love letter to the area and particularly the diverse community that can thrive in that sort of urban environment. You do have to kind of ignore the many coincidences of how certain people all know and keep running into one another in a city that big, though.
The book is a little slow in laying out its high-concept premise, but it’s ultimately revealed that the butch lesbian from our heroine’s subway meet-cute has somehow come unstuck in time and stuck in place, now able to exist solely within the limits of the Q-line train, where she hasn’t aged since the 1970s. The two women fall for each other hard, and then must navigate a very strange relationship while simultaneously trying to figure out what happened and how to undo it — which may cause Jane to vanish back into the past for good.
It’s a charming and endearingly original tale, full of characters who are easy to adore and frank conversations about lifestyles that aren’t always well-represented in popular media. The narrative occasionally takes shortcuts that undercut the stakes and leave a few side threads underdeveloped, but overall, it’s another delight from this #ownvoices writer.
[Content warning for mention of homophobia, transphobia, racism, and antisemitism.]
★★★★☆
–Subscribe at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke to support these reviews and weigh in on what I read next!–
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 