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One 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.
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Red, White and Royal Blue

4/5. You guys. You guys! Someone wrote a queer romance basically to spec for me. Son of the first woman POTUS falls in instant dislike which turns into, yeah, you know where this is going, with the youngest Prince of England.

I started this on a NY to DC train yesterday and finished it this morning. I laughed. I sniffled. I sighed. It's an unapologetically wish-fulfilment* book about American politics and elections and blended first families, written by someone who has 110% read the fanfic classics in the modern British royal romance genre like Drastically Redefining Protocol and The Student Prince (the one I have deeply unpopular opinions about, but that's a whole other story). It's snappy and witty and extremely of the now, to a fault, maybe. And also about different experiences of queerness and power and family. And they write each other love letters emails. Did I mention this was basically written for me?

*Maybe too wish-fulfimenty? I don't know. I have this odd sort of flinch reaction sometimes to things that are this committed to making me feel uncomplicatedly good about a fantasy political timeline that didn't happen. IDK if that's healthy or not. I'm a realist to a fault, and I have basically no patience left for the people on twitter who are still (fucking still!) going on about what President HRC would be doing. I mean, jesus, over here in the real world we've got shit to do, maybe you could try, like, engaging with that in a useful way instead of this pointless wanking? But I respect the balls-to-the-wall commitment of this book – she's going to make you feel good about a 2016 election that wasn't, and she's not sorry.

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