Review: Leaving the Station

  

Leaving the Station

by Jake Maia Arlow

Storytide, (imprint of HarperCollins), 2025

Category: Young Adult

Reviewer: Dena Bach

 

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"A Jew and a Mormon walk onto a train.” This sounds like a set up for a joke, as Zoe Tauber says to her fellow traveler Oakley, but it is instead an apt synopsis of Leaving the Station, this sapphic YA romance. When Oakley and Zoe meet, they have just boarded an Amtrak train in New York City. After running away from her actions and inaction during her first semester in college, Zoe has chosen to take the train for a slow trip back to her home in Seattle. Oakley’s destination is Ritzville WA, returning home after escaping from her highly prescriptive Mormon life there. Until she got to Cornell, Zoe had followed the straight and narrow track that her parents expected, towards becoming a doctor, but now she wants to take another route. Both Zoe and Oakley are using the long train trip as a liminal space to figure out how they feel about their religions, their sexuality, and the expected roles that their gender and identities dictate. As Zoe and Oakley share their thoughts, they begin to build a friendship with each other, as well as with some of their fellow travelers on the train. The closer the train gets to their destination, the closer Zoe and Oakley get to each other. Yet both know the trip will soon end, and they must make hard decisions about the future and about each other.

The narrative is centered on Oakley’s decision whether or not to leave Mormonism, but it is told from Zoe’s point of view. Zoe often considers her Judaism in her thoughts and in anecdotes, and always in a positive light. Her view of Judaism is not about her beliefs, or rather, lack of beliefs, but is more about the holiness she feels in the connection to other Jews and to her “ancestors going back thousands of years.” Both non-Jews and Jewish readers who are looking for a queer romance can relate to both the love story and to Zoe and Oakley’s struggles with their identities, as they each leave their homes for the first time.

 

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Reviewer Dena Bach studied Illustration at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has an MA/MFA in Children’s Literature and Writing for Children from Simmons University. She has worked as a bookseller, bookkeeper, fine artist, calligrapher, illustrator, writer, and a teacher of children from ages two to fourteen. She is currently learning sofrut and channeling her middle grade self as she works on an illustrated novel based on her father’s 11-year-old life, when he shared an apartment with a reformed mobster who had once been Al Capone’s cellmate.