transmissions from a second sky

Background info: I've gotten really into audiobooks recently. Since the divorce, my house has been super creepy quiet and, since I haven't really had the energy to watch TV (I'm not sure why my brain thinks it's easier to listen to a 10-plus-hour audiobook than it is to watch a 20-minute TV show, or listen to a one-hour podcast, but such is life), I've been listening to a lot of them. 

All different genres. Some novels. Some inspirational shit. A few Great Courses, though these often have had waitlists. My library has an extremely satisfactory online catalog, so I've had no end of options. 

My process for picking out my next book has been this:

Go to Libby. Filter by "available now" and "audiobooks". Do not add any other filters. Then, chose the best thing from the first page. 

This hasn't led me astray yet. I reiterate- it is seriously fucking crazy how much good content there is immediately available for free at this library. Nowhere else I've lived has a library system that compares. I deadass let my Buffalo and hometown library cards lapse over the past few years, since I found I haven't needed them. 

So, I've been using serendipity to fill my creative well. 

A week or so ago, I cast this line and hooked Casey McQuiston's debut novel, "Red, White, and Royal Blue," which I would later come to learn has a direct-to-streaming movie adaptation as well as an AO3 fanbase that puts all of my multiple current niche-as-fuck fandoms put together to shame. I'm kind of surprised I'd never heard of it before.

So, I went into that book blind and finished it in a matter of days. My fondest memory is when I was listening to it while driving through DC at rush hour to my friend's house, but my GPS got rerouted so it took me the stupidest most dangerous route. So there I was, basically having a panic attack behind the wheel, and that's the exact chapter of the book took a turn from being like a goofy millenial humor piece to being medium-spicy gay erotica, and dammit even though I was super distracted I didn't have the heart to turn it off so I could focus better on the road. 

Well, I guess I made it to Bethesda eventually?

Then, I went down this whole rabbit hole trying to figure out what fandom it had spawned out of before the serial numbers had been filed off, because lmao, this person is clearly One Of Us. At first I thought maybe like a modern day Merlin AU? 

I thought about it a while, and then I eventually decided that, no, while it's immediately obvious that Casey McQuiston is a fanfic writer, I don't actually think that this book was straight-up fanfic. It's got a little bit of something else to it too.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to One Last Stop. Because this book didn't feel so much like fanfiction to me. It felt like something original, and quite enjoyable. Maybe a little on the "twee" end of things, where everyone's LGBT and nothing hurts, and also it's set in NYC which immediately takes points off in my book (FUCK new york), but whatever. I ended up liking it despite all that.

The basic plot:

August Landry is a former girl detective (but only for one specific case: locating her mom's brother who has been missing for decades) who is absolutely determined to not return to The Life. Hoping to lay low, she moves to NYC, starts taking classes for some random-ass major at Brooklyn College, and starts working for some greasy spoon joint called Pancake Billy's House of Pancakes. Great, mission accomplished, fade to black.

But then, she has a real-cute meet-cute with a girl on the subway who she later learns ~dOeS nOt ExIsT iN hEr TiMeLiNe~ and ~cAnNoT pHySiCaLlY lEaVe ThE tRaIn~ because she's supposed to be living in the 1970s and it all goes cray-cray from there. Her roommate, a spiritual medium who (gradually, over the course of the book) you realize has magic powers For Real, determines that she is not a ghost. Her other roommate, who is like a highly educated electrical engineer who gave up her degree to make art out of frog bones and inject sass into most of the scenes in the book, helps her figure out that her love interest, Jane, is tied to the electrical energy of the train. And August discovers, to her absolute emotional ruination, that the more she kisses Jane, the more the other girl remembers about her own life and the other characters that played a part in it, which helps her become more real. So then it turns in to that trope that I am HORRIBLY, DOWN-BAD WEAK for, where at least one the characters has feelings for the other but can't state them honestly but is also somehow in a situation where they're kissing/ casually fucking etc. 

Then, the feelings get requited. REEEEE!

And then they do some Oceans Eleven heist shit to blow up the train line's electrical system to hopefully free her from the train. 

Also, at one point Train Girl Jane gets so horny that her emotions blackout the train, giving her and August the opportunity to fuck. 

[Circling back to a previous theme: I was also listening to this as an audiobook. And the love confession/ subsequent trainfucking occurred while I was weaving my way through heavy traffic on route 66. 

...you know, I had always though that people were exaggerating when they said shit like "ohhh your fanfic made me squeal and flap all my limbs around!!! omg" But... to my chagrin (and possible death), I did sort of start flailing in the middle of that perilous highway.]

But yeah. Ahem. Cough. It's an excellent book. Five stars.