One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

 

What is your favorite book or movie that contains time travel elements?

I have loved time travel since I was a kid watching Star Trek, Back to the Future, and Somewhere in Time.  I love to read any books with time travel elements involved.  One Last Stop is the June selection for the Brenda Novak Book Group, and I was excited to read it.

August has moved to New York City and has found a new job at a diner, and an apartment full of eclectic characters.   As she gets to know them, they become a family.  August meets a mysterious and attractive woman named Jane on the subway.  Soon she starts to wonder why she only sees Jane on the subway and never anywhere else.   She determines that Jane is stuck in a time loop.  How can she get to know Jane and break her out of the time loop?

Characters are one of the most important elements to me in a novel, and McQuiston writes excellent characters in One Last Stop.  Jane and August were fully fleshed three dimensional characters, and the supporting cast was wonderful as well.  I loved that McQuiston was able to give a voice to LGBTQIA+ characters and show their struggles and joys.  I really loved Jane.  She was part of so much in the 1970s as a queer Asian woman.  I feel like she could have a spin off novel of her own.

My one negative with this novel is that it got bogged down in the middle.  A lot of it had to do with the paranormal and time travel elements not making much sense.  After listening to Brenda Novak’s interview with Casey McQuiston, it’s starting to make sure more sense to me.  She’s going for more the Kate & Leopold vibe where love prevails, but you don’t really know why it does with the paranormal / time travel element.

Favorite Quotes:

“Truth is, when you spend your whole life alone, it’s incredibly appealing to move somewhere big enough to get lost in, where being alone looks like a choice. . . “

“But engineering as a career kind of murders your soul, and my job pays me enough.”  Hey – I like being an engineer!

“Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory – levee sunset nights, hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought it would stand out, singular and crystallized, in your memory forever – they aren’t really anything.  They’re everything, and they’re nothing.  They make you who you are, and they happen at the same time a twenty-three -year0old a million miles away is warming up some leftovers, turning in early, switching off the lamp.  They’re so easy to lose.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I fell out of time because I never really belonged where I started, and the universe is trying to tell me something.”

“Those are the worse reasons to break the laws of space and time.”

Overall, One Last Stop is a unique novel with great characters that does get a big bogged down with the time loop details.

Book Source:  Review Copy from Net Galley and St. Martin’s Publishing Company.  Thank-you!