After their previous hit romance, Red, White, and Royal Blue, I was pretty eager to read Casey McQuiston’s new cute Summer romance. I had bookmarked it a while back, a cute subway romance seemed right up my alley as someone who doesn’t usually go for straight-up romance books.
I found myself getting annoyed with the exact same thing that I got annoyed with in their previous book, but it’s definitely a fun and cute read if you can get past the writing style. I’m thinking this would be the perfect beach read for anyone who doesn’t get annoyed by impossible and poorly thought through scientific explanations (my ultimate downfall when it comes to a lot of fantasy/sci fi/fiction). The writing style was just not good enough for me to suspend belief and not get caught up on little things.
⚡️ I was provided with an e-ARC by the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
This post also includes an affiliate link to purchase this book.
One Last Stop
by Casey McQuiston
🌟: 2 / 5
📚: August hopes that her move to Brooklyn, and away from her missing-persons obsessed mother, will be the beginning of a new chapter of her life, until she meets impossibly hot Jane on the Q, and stumbles into an even bigger mystery that her mother prepared her for— how to stop time for the love of her life.
💭: This book itself really embraces the manic pixie dream girl trope in itself, it sounds so good and magical and everyone loves it, but it’s painfully average in reality. And I’m not saying that because hot Jane spends about half of the book embodying this trope. The synopsis made this sound like an ideal romance to me in its combination of sci-fi mystery and hot train lesbians, but usually when things seem too good to be true, they really are. It’s exactly one half poetic and beautifully written and one half painfully awkward and embarrassingly one-dimensional.
While some moments stand out as gorgeous and sweet, they feel as though they were written by a different author and thrown into the mix to bring me back from dying from secondhand embarrassment over the rest of the book. So much of this book is relatable, but in the I’m-in-this-picture-and-don’t-like-it way. In the same way that my high school English teacher made us reflect on why we hated Daisy in The Great Gatsby because of our internalized misogyny and subliminal self-hate, a lot of the characters in this book sent me into a soft rage that I totally recognized [yes I, a bitchy Libra who likes to talk science but has an art degree, seethed every time Myla appeared (yes, that often)].
There were so many occasions where I would stop with the thought that if I wanted to hear so many meme references and millennial discourse, I would prefer to spend 8 hours of my life on Twitter than the time I spent listening to this audiobook. The tone of the writing is something that I can only describe as “White Women Woke,” and I was just so uncomfortable the majority of the time. This book isn’t poorly written, there were paragraphs that were romantic, poetic, and very grown-up sounding that would surprise me, right before diving back into almost childish-edgy drivel (sorry, but using swearing as filler text is Not It for me, it gives off the vibe of someone who was given copy edits and said “you’re wrong” to the editor and added more).
All of this being said, I completely can understand why people love this book. There are so many folks that can see themselves in this story; however, I just wish that there was a better women loving women romance with a bi protagonist that people would get obsessed with. It made me question whether this book is actually good and it’s going over my head or if the book is, in fact, bad and there isn’t enough other stories with diverse casts and queer romances.
I very genuinely was afraid to give this book a negative review because everyone is so obsessed with it (it having a 4.51/5 on Goodreads is just absurd to me), but at a point in the book, I felt like I was hate-reading it and just too far to give up on it (although I did joke about DNF’ing mid-chapter two, so not finishing was always on my mind). It was exhaustingly embarrassing, occasionally slow as hell, and weirdly childish at times.
I just can’t get over this book that was supposed to be a sweet good-times-read ended up being something that agitated me so much.