A review by rinku
One Last Stop: Der letzte Halt ist erst der Anfang by Casey McQuiston

emotional funny hopeful slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

 As sad as this may be, One Last Stop showed me that contemporary romance is just not my genre since I gave the book 2.5 stars. It just bored me so much that I thought of DNFing it, and the magical aspect of the story was way too underdeveloped to keep me interested – a classical case of “it’s not you, it’s me”. The only thing I really enjoyed was how queer the story was but not much more.  

The story focusses on August who moves to New York to start a new life. There, she meets Jane on public transport with whom she falls in love with instantly. She notices that Jane never leaves the train and finds out that there seems to be some magic that is keeping her there since the 1970s. We then get the big drama and an arbitrary time limit when repair work is planned at the line for which it has to be shut down and no one knows what will happen to Jane then. Here, it becomes clear for the first time that the premise doesn’t work out perfectly. Was the line not shut down since the 1970s? Were there not some repair works before? 

Anyways, the rest of the plot focuses on – surprise! – the romance between Jane and August. I don’t know what to think about it honestly? I’ll have to say that because of the setting of public transport, there were many scenes that me uncomfortable like the spicy ones – some people may be into this, but I’m definitely not. In the end, I started to find them cute, but I felt not much more between them. 

Besides this, we have some random family drama about the brother of August’s mom. August became kinda unlikable for me here because she’s so mean to her mother and complaining so much that she has to help her to look for her brother. I don’t know, seems a first world problem to me. She also never tries to see the things like her mom does not think about how traumatic this must be for her mom and how she tries to cope with it. This plot is solved way too conveniently because
Jane suddenly knew the brother
. 

Another problem I had was with the writing itself. There are barely any descriptions of the subway or the surroundings. The dialogues were too try-hard funny for me and just a bit too much. I also had the feeling that many interesting aspects of the story were told and not shown. For example, I would love to see more about August’s university life. Furthermore, it is only told to us how she gets closer to her flat mates but not shown; same goes for the backstories of the characters – of course, I don’t mean flashbacks by this but there are so many interesting ways with which the backstory of a character can be shown. 

Coming to the characters, I wasn’t the biggest fan of August. One of the reasons was her behaviour towards her mom, like mentioned above. She’s also one of those book characters that don’t need to study but still have amazing grades. Those people exist but they are overproportioned in fiction which sends some weird signals to people who have to study to get good grades. I didn’t like Jane so much either? She was just too extroverted for me – like I said, a “me-problem”. Just imagining her dancing through the whole tram while some people just want to go to work makes me cringe, same goes for all the characters celebrating a party there. The side characters in comparison were great, and I love how queer they were. They’re one of the reasons that I’m giving a half extra star because I got quite attached to them. 

Like I’ve said in the beginning, One Last Stop is probably the right book for man people but just not for me: It was too contemporary for me and is probably already outdated in five years. Additionally, just reading about this big city life made me anxious, so yeah, not my cup of tea. 
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