Before The Coffee Gets Cold
by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Genres: FantasyPages: 213
Rating:
Synopsis:What would you change if you could go back in time?
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, see their sister one last time, and meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold...
I had suspected that Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold wouldn’t be entirely my thing, so I wasn’t surprised to find that I didn’t love it. It made decent light reading for the car, and I wanted to give it a try since I know other people have really loved it. Mostly, the style (or possibly the translation) didn’t quite work for me — there was quite a bit of reiteration and stating the obvious.
That said, I did enjoy the way it set up time travel with some really heavy constraints, and then played within them to show that you don’t have to change history with time travel to get what you need out of it. The stories are a little sentimental, but more or less in a way I expected, so there’s that. And I did like the story about the guy with Alzheimer’s, and how his wife decided to handle it.
In the end it isn’t deeply profound and life-changing — at least, I didn’t find it to be so — but it was pleasant, and I’m glad I gave it a shot. I might even read the other books at some point, if the library has the ebooks and I feel like they might fit in somewhere.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
I have no desire to read this, probably for the reasons you mentioned. And I would want more of an impactful ending, which sounds like the book is missing. At least now you’re in the “I read that” club
Yeah, for me it was just “okay”, and usually there are too many other fun books out there to spend time on something meh.
I read this first book in the series at just the right time for it to have a big impact on me, and I liked it a lot. But then each following book in the series that I’ve read has been less and less impactful, and felt more repetitive. So if you were already feeling the repetition in book one, just be warned that it won’t get any better in future installments of the series.
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I also found the writing style itself quite repetitive, so I think more would probably drive me nuts — though if I spaced them out it’d probably be okay.