This book made me realise what love is. It's not solely kissing, dating or even missing someone. It includes risking your life for someone, letting someone go for the good even if it hurts you the most and, eventually returning for them. A mix of fantasy surrounding the protagonist who helps this girl she met in the subway return to her own timeline while falling in love with her. It's steamy and full of yearning. The best thing about it is that it also you acknowledge the importance of friendship and going out of the ways to help someone for the sake of platonic love. And that's done incredibly. The drag representation was well done again.
BUT what I absolutely did not understand was how did August even manage to graduate while spending so much of her time in the subway. When you're in college your schedules are loaded with assignments and all and you absolutely cannot afford living in a sci fi movie and trying to help your lover teleport back to their timeline. Neither did Mcquiston care to mention August keeping up assignment nor with her responsibly showing up for the work. In the real world, someone would get fired right away with that behaviour. And yeah, pace is a problem with this book. It could have been wrapped up within 300 pages but was dragged on and on to about 420 pages.
What do y'all think though???
by EngineerElectrical75
1 Comment
I read this book years ago when it was first released and I remember feeling really flat on the whole thing. It felt like a bit of a repurposed version of The Mediator series by Meg Cabot (which would make sense as McQuiston would be the right age to have grown up with those books).
I think my main issue with this and a lot of McQuiston’s writing is that her characters often feel like a caricature of LGBTQ+ individuals. Its like they’re bad CW characters where their queerness can be so over the top and dominating and then passive. And to be clear, I’m not saying that queer people are all the same and that we shouldn’t be reminded of their experience and lens throughout the story, but it often feels like an afterthought fact to attribute to a character rather then fully forming the character with that in mind.
That being said, I think where the book does shine is some of the interaction between Jane and August in terms of meeting someone, learning about them, falling in love and figuring out what the relationship looks like to them. I also think its a pretty good representation of someone exploring the confusing lines between friendship and romance, especially when you haven’t necessarily explored a same sex attraction before. It was very relatable to my own experiences figuring out my sexuality and dating other women.
Its not a book I would rush to recommend but its a cute enough story.