A cute queer coming of age story with a bit of a love story woven in. 

Zoe is trying to find the slowest way home from college for thanksgiving break and decides on a 4 day train ride from New York to Seattle. She’s running from the mistakes she made during her first semester in college, running from herself and the questions she has about her sexuality and gender and future, and she’s not trying to run towards the disaster of a conversation she’ll have to have with her parents when she arrives home over break. 

So she takes the train. Hoping the slow ride and distance will help sort things out. But instead she meets people, makes friends, and her whole life and perspective begins to change from these random strangers on a train. 

Zoe meets Oakley, a girl who grew up in the Mormon church and left for New York City hoping to find an accepting queer community, only things didn’t quite work out that way. So she’s running from herself mistakes in New York too. As she heads home to Washington on the train Zoe catches her eye, someone who is very outwardly queer appearing. And she’s intrigued. They form a reluctant friendship at first that morphs into something more as they open up about what they’re running from and what they might be slowly riding the train towards.

I did like this a lot but I do think Zoe was just kind of a terrible person for most of the book, realistic but still not great. Her relationship with Alden was also very strange. It felt very manic pixie dream girl meets manic pixie dream boy and very self serving on both sides. But she does seem to redeem herself when she gets her head out of her ass so it works out in the end.