Review: Leaving the Station by Jake Maia Arlow

Review: Leaving the Station by Jake Maia Arlow

Perfect for #SapphicSeptember as well as holiday reads, Leaving the Station by Jake Maia Arlow, set on a cross-country train ride over Thanksgiving break from our MCs first semester of college while they explore who and what they want out of life…just big thoughts to have while on a train home.

Thank you to Storytide, and BookSparks for the finished copy!

Leaving the Station

by Jake Maia Arlow
Published by: Storytide
on August 19, 2025
Genres: Contemporary, LGBTQIA+, Young Adult
Bookshop, Amazon
Goodreads

Sometimes, looking at him was like looking in a fun-house mirror.

Zoe’s life has gone off the rails.

When she left Seattle to go to college in New York, she was determined to start fresh, to figure out what being a lesbian meant to her, experiment with clothes and presentation away from home for the first time.

Instead, she lost touch with her freshman orientation friend group, skipped classes, and failed completely at being the studious premed student her parents wanted her to be.

But the biggest derailment of all? Her newly minted ex-boyfriend—and the fact that she had a boyfriend to begin with. When she met Alden, he made her feel wanted, he made her feel free. He made her feel . . . like she could be like him, which was exciting and confusing all at once.

So, Zoe decides a second fresh start is in order: she’s going to take a cross-country train from New York to Seattle for fall break. There, no one will know who she is, and she can outrun her mistakes.

Or so she thinks, until she meets Oakley, who’s the opposite of Zoe in so many ways: effortlessly cool and hot, smart, self-assured. But as Zoe and Oakley make their way across the county, Zoe realizes that Oakley’s life has also gone off the rails—and that they might just be able to help each other along before that train finally leaves the station.

Review

Leaving the Station by Jake Maia Arlow is technically a road trip story as well as a holiday story (I loved their last holiday novel How to Excavate a Heart) as this story takes place on a cross-country trip over Thanksgiving break from college. And I love promoting holiday reads, so there you go. Now let me correct some of that statement; the trip is technically a train-ride, where you can actually talk and meet other passengers on the train, which I absolutely romanticize since long form train rides are very much a lost form of travel these days. It is also technically about a week before the actual Thanksgiving holiday takes place, and the MC, Zoe wants to use this opportunity to waste as much time of their break as possible to not have to go home for a holiday they do not even really believe in (my kind of thinker!) or to see their parents (valid).

I love college set books, because to me this is the real crux of being a young adult…not a teenager anymore on your own able to make and break you, but somehow marketing pushed the college stuff out and made YA all about younger teens, then the older teen stories get kind of glorified for adults. It’s weird and that discussion is for another post, not this review. Back to the topic, I love college-aged stories, the characters really have a chance to become whom they always wanted to be outside of the ever watchful eyes of their parents and that is the real focus on both Zoe and Oakley in this story.

Zoe is struggling with her identity, she went to college across the country to hopefully have a fresh start, be the strong lesbian she saw in her mind, but things changed quickly when she ended up dating a guy. A guy whom none of her new friends really liked, and soon Zoe realized that maybe she didn’t like him either, and her desire was wrapped up in wanting to be more like him than date him. This is such a good exploration of this since in this book it revolves around gender expression and mistaking gender-envy for romantic feelings. It really did this so well through flashbacks of Zoe’s experiences with her ex-boyfriend.

Oakley left home and her entire religion because she knew that being a lesbian wasn’t acceptable to her family, but she misses them, and didn’t have the NYC experiences she expected to have, instead she was still ostracized and felt out of place, and then decided to return home on this train where her and Zoe are thrust together in the dining car…because yes family style seating is a thing when there is limited spaces, i.e. the whole romanticizing of train travel makes these two find each other!

I really enjoyed this exposition on coming of age and trying to be the person you want to be without your parents and then having to maybe figure out you are something else or want to be something else, meanwhile Zoe’s and Oakley’s past keep influencing them and their decisions. Oakley and Zoe’s conversations are extremely influenced by comparing and contrasting their experiences in religion and life. I loved the train setting and the hijinks, but even if they may be slightly unbelievable it was still a fun and important story.

Funny characters and wild experiences abound while being thought-provoking, when this nonbinary Jewish lesbian and an ex-Mormon lesbian, find each other on a train while leading to many conversations about religion, sexuality, gender, and parental expectations.