Score: 5/5 Bookmarks

Steam Level: 🔥🔥🔥 /5

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for gifting me a review audiobook of One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston. What can I say about this book that hasn’t already been said? It’s quite simply brilliant. I loved Red, White, and Royal Blue but this book just burrowed even deeper into my heart, and months after reading it I still think about it all the time.

August is 23 years old, and her move to New York has not been as glamorous as she’d hoped. She ends up moving in with three eclectic roommates and gets a job waitressing at a pancake diner. She’s wondering how she can turn her life around when she meets Jane on the subway. Jane is retro, and funny, and effortlessly cool, and there is just something about her that August is drawn to.

She starts changing her schedule and commute so she can see Jane more often. The two start to talk, and become friends, but gradually August starts to notice a few unusual things about Jane. For starters, she still uses a walkman, and her taste in music is decidedly old-school. Jane is stuck on the subway…and has been for decades. August sets about trying to get Jane to remember more from her past, and solve the mystery of how she became stuck in time—all the while, falling more and more in love with her.

The supporting characters in this book were so, so outstanding. I want them all to get their own separate books because I desperately need to know more about them. I don’t want to spoil too much because you need to read this one for yourself, but even if the rest of the book and August and Jane’s story wasn’t so incredible (which it absolutely is), the supporting characters would have made this a book that I’ll hold in my heart forever.

This was our June pick for Three Friends Book Club and it was just the best book club discussion. There was so much to unpack, so many details to pour over, and so many characters to fall in love with. There’s romance, history, magical realism, and so much more.

Natalie Naudus is the audiobook narrator and she couldn’t have done a more beautiful job of bringing the characters to life and sucking you into the story until you were completely immersed and felt like you really were right there walking beside them. I’ve listened to a few audiobooks performed by Natalie recently and she’s become one of my absolute favorites. You might recognize her from The Dating Dare, Cool for the Summer, The Donut Trap, and Skyhunter. The audio comes in at just over 12 hours long, but clear your schedule because once you start you won’t want to stop for anything!

You can grab the audiobook via the button below, or get a physical copy here.

Synopsis:

For cynical twenty-three-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don’t exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone. She can’t imagine how waiting tables at a 24-hour pancake diner and moving in with too many weird roommates could possibly change that. And there’s certainly no chance of her subway commute being anything more than a daily trudge through boredom and electrical failures.

But then, there’s this gorgeous girl on the train.

Jane. Dazzling, charming, mysterious, impossible Jane. Jane with her rough edges and swoopy hair and soft smile, showing up in a leather jacket to save August’s day when she needed it most. August’s subway crush becomes the best part of her day, but pretty soon, she discovers there’s one big problem: Jane doesn’t just look like an old school punk rocker. She’s literally displaced in time from the 1970s, and August is going to have to use everything she tried to leave in her own past to help her. Maybe it’s time to start believing in some things, after all.

Casey McQuiston’s One Last Stop is a magical, sexy, big-hearted romance where the impossible becomes possible as August does everything in her power to save the girl lost in time.