Hi friends, happy Monday! I hope you’re all doing well. Today I’m posting my review of Before the Coffee Gets Cold by: Toshikazu Kawaguchi.

This was translated from Japanese by: Geoffrey Trousselot.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by: Toshikazu Kawaguchi: There is a small café in a back alley of Tokyo that has been brewing coffee for centuries, but what this café offers its patronages, is something beyond just normal coffee, it offers them the chance to travel back in time. In this novel, we meet three individuals who wish to use the experience to visit with a loved one from the past, and one from the future. It was a touching novel, that for the most part, had a really cool concept; the reader was invested, even when things felt a little confusing. The way this was laid out, it took some time to understand the rules of time traveling. For each character, it felt like new rules kept coming up, which made it feel inconsistent and hard to keep track of. It made it seem like each person had their own set of rules, rather than there being a universal set of rules. This then made it feel slightly repetitive because the rules kept having to be explained for each of the four stories. It left the novel reading clunky, and maybe that has a part to do with the translation as well, but it was kinda a bother to read at times. Because we had to spend so much time explaining the protocols, it took away from the storytelling, which is a shame because these stories were so beautiful. This novel was so short that we didn’t feel like we got enough time with the characters and understanding their stories. When you strip it all down, this novel had so much heart with a heartwarming concept that there were times it was hard not to love it. Most of our characters wanted to travel to the past to see loved ones again and to know that things would be okay. A lot of it was reassurance and some stories were just so heartbreaking, but there was something so graceful in the way Kawaguchi wrote this; it was so humanizing and relatable to read of their grief and the different forms it can take. In the end, it was a different read and one that, even though this reader has mixed emotions about, the good outweighed the bad.