A Time-Traveling Waitress Made Me Believe in Love Again

A girl, a train, and a woman who might be a ghost

August is twenty-three, chronically unimpressed with her own life, and has just moved to New York because her mother’s decades-long obsession with a missing uncle has finally worn her down into needing distance. She gets a crappy apartment with a cast of roommates who all read like they wandered in from a slightly better sitcom (the drag queen, the anarchist skater, the guy who may or may not be a ghost himself), a job at a pancake diner called Billy’s, and a daily commute on the Q train where she keeps running into the same beautiful girl in a leather jacket.

Here’s the thing though: Jane isn’t just a girl on a train. Jane is stuck on the train. Literally. She’s a butch mechanic from the 1970s who’s been sliding through decades of subway commuters, unaged and unstuck, for reasons nobody understands, and August is apparently the first person in a very long time who can actually see her, remember her, touch her. The premise is gonzo and McQuiston knows it, and to her credit she doesn’t spend three hundred pages making you swallow the rules of the magic. It just is what it is: a girl trapped in time, on the world’s least romantic form of public transit, and another girl determined to get her out.

The parts that got me, and the parts that made me roll my eyes

Let’s start with what works, because a lot does. McQuiston writes New York like someone who has actually stood on a Q train platform at two in the morning smelling like a griddle, which August does, constantly, because Billy’s Diner is one of the best-drawn workplaces I’ve read in a romance in years. The regulars, the drag brunch, Winfield the world’s most oblivious cook, the group texts. It’s warm without being saccharine, which is a hard needle to thread.

And Jane. Jane is the reason to read this book. She’s funny in that deadpan, don’t-give-a-damn way that could easily read as a type but McQuiston gives her real grief underneath it: she doesn’t remember how she got stuck, she’s watched decades of her own life disappear, and there’s a slow reveal about who she was before the train that recontextualizes everything and made me actually gasp on a plane somewhere over Ohio. I don’t cry on planes. I welled up on a plane.

Now the part where I have to be honest with you. The time-loop mechanics are mushy. There’s a rulebook for how Jane can and can’t interact with the world that gets bent whenever the plot needs it to, and by the last act, when the mystery-solving kicks into gear with August’s ragtag friend group essentially LARPing an episode of a paranormal procedural, I felt the seams. There’s also a stretch in the middle where the will-they-won’t-they gets repetitive, August circling the same anxiety about permanence and loss without much forward motion, and I found myself skimming a chapter I probably wasn’t supposed to skim. This is not “Red, White and Royal Blue.” It’s messier, structurally, and it asks you to accept some genuinely silly logic (I will not spoil how the resolution works, but when I got there I laughed out loud, not entirely with the book).

Tangent: I picked this up during a genuinely bad week, recovering from a work thing that had me convinced I was going to be stuck exactly where I was forever, and reading a book literally about a woman who is stuck, forever, on a train, hit different than it would have on a normal Tuesday. Sometimes the book finds you at the wrong or exactly right moment and you can’t tell which.

What I keep coming back to is the tenderness of it. There’s a scene where August, who has spent her whole life refusing to want anything because wanting things means losing them, finally just says what she wants out loud to Jane, plainly, without a joke to hide behind, and it’s such a quiet moment in a book full of noisy set pieces that it stuck with me more than the big magical climax did. That’s the trick McQuiston pulls off when she’s at her best: big weird premise, small human ache underneath it.

Am I overrating this because I have a soft spot for scrappy queer found family stories set in cities I love? Maybe. I went back and forth on whether this is a four or a five for longer than I’ll admit, and I think the honest answer is it’s a four that occasionally, in specific scenes, plays like a five.

The scariest thing about wanting to stay somewhere is admitting you never wanted to leave anything before.

About Casey McQuiston

Casey McQuiston writes like they’ve had exactly one good coffee and four hours of sleep and decided to bet everything on charm, and it mostly works. They broke out with “Red, White and Royal Blue” in 2019, which turned “what if the President’s son fell for a British prince” into a genuine phenomenon and a Prime Video movie, then followed it with “One Last Stop” and later “I Kissed Shara Wheeler.” McQuiston’s whole thing is big swings wrapped in banter: high concept premises, chatty prose, characters who process trauma through jokes until they can’t anymore. You either vibe with the voice immediately or you find it exhausting. There’s not much middle ground, and I respect a writer who doesn’t try to find one.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• “Red, White and Royal Blue” by Casey McQuiston, for more of that same banter-forward, big-swing romance energy, this time with actual royalty involved
• “The Seven Year Slip” by Ashley Poston, for another romance that uses a time-bending gimmick to talk about grief and letting go
• “Him” by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy, if what you actually wanted was the slow burn and the workplace found family minus the sci-fi rules
• “The Ex Hex” by Erin Sterling, for lighter magical-realism romance with the same “found family plus a supernatural wrinkle” comfort factor

You can grab a copy here: One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston.

For your book club

1. Does the book earn its ending, or does the resolution feel like it’s bending its own rules to get August and Jane together?
2. August spends the whole book refusing to want permanence. Where did you first believe she’d changed?
3. How does the found-family cast at Billy’s Diner change the shape of the romance plot? Would the book work without them?
4. Jane is written as a woman out of time in more than one sense. What did the book get right, or wrong, about grounding her in the 1970s versus the modern day?
5. Is this a romance novel with a fantasy plot stapled on, or a fantasy novel that happens to be a romance? Does the answer change how forgiving you are of the logic gaps?