One Last Stop

One Last Stop Review

Casey McQuiston’s second novel takes on a more structurally ambitious premise than the alt-history romance of Red, White & Royal Blue — a love story between a woman in 2020 and a woman who has been displaced into the present from 1977, trapped on a New York subway train by forces the novel deliberately chooses not to fully explain. The result is McQuiston’s most emotionally serious work, wrapped in the warmth and humor that characterized the debut.

August Landry is a loner by habit and history — she has moved so many times that investment in people feels like a setup for loss. New York is just another city until she meets Jane Su on the Q train, a punk girl who turns out to be literally impossible: stuck in 1977, visible and present but unable to leave the train. August, who wants nothing more than to be left alone, finds herself unable to stop coming back.

The Found Family

What grounds the magical premise is the ensemble of August’s apartment building — her roommates and the regulars at the diner where she works, a community of queer young New Yorkers who become the found family that August didn’t know she was looking for. McQuiston draws this group with individual specificity, and their collective investment in August’s impossible situation gives the novel’s more fantastical elements an emotional anchor.

The Question the Premise Asks

The central romantic question of One Last Stop is genuinely interesting: what does it mean to love someone you cannot have in the ordinary sense? Jane exists. She is real. The connection is real. The circumstances make the future impossible — or require dismantling the impossible to make the future possible. McQuiston approaches this with more seriousness than the premise might suggest.

McQuiston’s New York

The city itself is a character in ways that romance novels rarely achieve. McQuiston’s New York — specifically queer, specifically 2020, specifically experienced through public transit — is rendered with the affection of someone who has fallen genuinely in love with a place and wants to put that love on the page.

The Subway as a World

McQuiston’s masterstroke is the setting of the central romance: the Q train, where Jane is trapped, becomes the entire territory of the love story. Every meeting between August and Jane must happen in transit, in the liminal, fluorescent-lit space of the New York subway, and McQuiston turns this constraint into the book’s defining poetry. The train is at once prison and sanctuary, a place where time has folded and a 1977 punk and a 2020 student can occupy the same car. By confining the lovers to public transit, the novel makes the ordinary machinery of the city — its delays, its strangers, its underground arteries — into the stuff of romance and magic. It is a genuinely original conceit, and it gives the book a sense of place that few contemporary romances achieve.

A Love Story Across Time

Beneath the warmth, One Last Stop asks a genuinely poignant question: what does it mean to fall in love with someone displaced from another decade, someone whose future may require unmaking the very condition that brought her to you? Jane is a queer Asian-American woman from the 1970s, and McQuiston uses her displacement to draw a quiet line between two eras of queer life — the activism, loss, and danger of Jane’s time and the more visible community August inhabits. The romance becomes, in part, an act of recovery: August must reconstruct Jane’s lost history to free her, which doubles as a tribute to a generation of queer people whom history tried to erase. The time-travel premise, handled with restraint, becomes a vehicle for memory and inheritance as much as for love.

The Found Family

What grounds the magical premise in emotional reality is August’s found family — her eccentric roommates and the regulars at the all-night diner where she works, a community of queer young New Yorkers who fold her in despite her instinct to keep everyone at arm’s length. McQuiston draws this ensemble with real individuality, and their collective investment in freeing Jane gives the fantastical plot a beating heart. August’s true arc is not only the romance but her gradual surrender to connection — her discovery that belonging is worth the risk of loss she has spent her life avoiding. The found-family theme, a staple of queer storytelling, is rendered here with unusual specificity and tenderness, and it is what lifts the book above its high-concept hook.

McQuiston’s New York

The city itself is a character in ways romance novels rarely achieve. McQuiston’s New York is specifically queer, specifically of 2020, and specifically experienced from below — through subway platforms, diner counters, cramped apartments, and the small economies of young people scraping by. It is rendered with the ardor of a writer who has fallen genuinely in love with a place and wants that love on the page. This density of texture is what allows the novel’s fantastical and romantic elements to feel earned rather than arbitrary: because the ordinary city is so vividly real, the impossible thing at its center becomes believable. The result is McQuiston’s most emotionally serious book, trading the breezy escapism of the debut for something deeper without losing the humor and warmth that made them beloved.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — McQuiston’s most emotionally ambitious work: a queer love story that earns its magical conceit by grounding it in specificity of place, community, and feeling.