One Last Stop, Casey McQuiston
One Last Stop was a lot of fun. I thought that the blurb itself kind of spoiled part of that fun, though: there’s very little mystery about… let’s call it the central problem of the book. If you read the blurb, the first 90 pages of the book may be lacking something for you, since you know something the characters can’t know. On the one hand, you might not quite figure out the genre of the book, since it reads as plain ol’ contemporary romance, and on the other, well, plenty of romance has that kind of plot device. (Thinking of Susanna Kearsley here…)
There’s plenty to love other than that, of course: the lovable cast of characters (especially Niko) are basically the queer found family that many queer people in their 20s dream of, and the ups and downs can be both funny and painful, sometimes at the same time. In some ways, I suppose it tries very hard to be acceptably quirky and to make the found family feel very relatable… but that’s all part of making you feel part of it.
Sometimes I felt like the pace was a bit off, and that time would pass in these big jerks that get covered by a paragraph… but it took me longer to read it than I’d have liked, only to end in me mainlining the last 100 pages in an evening, so part of that is also my reading pace.
