One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
Aug. 7th, 2021 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsOne Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
3/5. August is a loner, but that doesn't hold up long when she moves to NYC and accidentally straight into a queer community. And then there's Jane, the girl she keeps seeing on the train and who, she eventually realizes, is time displaced from the 1970's.
Hm. Aspects of this are great – banter, genuinely hot lesbian sex (imagine that!), the narrator's slide into found family. But I also found a constant low-level stream of annoyances that accumulated throughout the book, to the point that I finished it with a feeling of exasperation instead of the fulfillment and satisfaction I was supposed to feel. Just a sampler: the truly towering coincidence that powers the last quarter, the thing where McQuiston needs to get some relationship-development lever other than 'drunk at a party of the young and fabulous' because there's only so many books you can pull that one and we're already there, the hazy 'I read a lot of Wikipedia history entries' feel of the 1970's queer scene details, the way the whole thing felt pretty much all the time like it's craning to show its best angles to a movie producer instead of a reader.
IDK, is it just me? I would buy that, considering I read pieces of this book on the road trip from hell (sitting in the backseat next to a toddler in a constant state of puking or about to puke while it was 90 degrees). So like, IDEK.
3/5. August is a loner, but that doesn't hold up long when she moves to NYC and accidentally straight into a queer community. And then there's Jane, the girl she keeps seeing on the train and who, she eventually realizes, is time displaced from the 1970's.
Hm. Aspects of this are great – banter, genuinely hot lesbian sex (imagine that!), the narrator's slide into found family. But I also found a constant low-level stream of annoyances that accumulated throughout the book, to the point that I finished it with a feeling of exasperation instead of the fulfillment and satisfaction I was supposed to feel. Just a sampler: the truly towering coincidence that powers the last quarter, the thing where McQuiston needs to get some relationship-development lever other than 'drunk at a party of the young and fabulous' because there's only so many books you can pull that one and we're already there, the hazy 'I read a lot of Wikipedia history entries' feel of the 1970's queer scene details, the way the whole thing felt pretty much all the time like it's craning to show its best angles to a movie producer instead of a reader.
IDK, is it just me? I would buy that, considering I read pieces of this book on the road trip from hell (sitting in the backseat next to a toddler in a constant state of puking or about to puke while it was 90 degrees). So like, IDEK.
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Date: 2021-08-08 04:19 pm (UTC)I was exasperated by it too. It simultaneously felt like it was trying too hard and not trying hard enough, and I had some issues with the fact August functionally has control over their entire relationship and also, in some ways, Jane.
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Date: 2021-08-08 05:58 pm (UTC)Yes. I think Jane getting a phone was supposed to right the power dynamic a bit but it's way too little. It would have helped a lot if Jane was able to appear consistently to many other people, whether August's friends or not, and had other relationships outside from the fleeting ones she is implied to have and the ones she gets only through August.