August 2022 Review of Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Date-8.24.22

 Before the Coffee Gets Cold (#1 of Before the Coffee Gets Cold)

Written by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Geoffrey Trousselot (Translator)

About from Goodreads.com

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, to see their sister one last time, and to 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 . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?

Review

    A while ago I was looking at blogs for time travel books and one of them (sadly I cannot recall the name of the blog) brought up this book and right away the concept fascinated me. A Chair in a cafe that can time travel you? What’s not to love? This book did not let me down at all.  

    I enjoyed that each chapter was a different short story about different people that use the chair to time travel.  Another thing I really liked was the entire concept of this book was amazing and all of the rules the time traveler had to follow, like you can’t change the outcome of the present, you cannot leave the chair and you cannot let your coffee get cold; just to name a few of the rules. I also really enjoyed how bittersweet every story was. I ended up smiling at the end of every single one of them.

    I ended up not having anything from this book I didn't like. I enjoyed all of it. So I give this book 5 stars because I really enjoyed it and I cannot wait to start reading the next one. I completely understand how this book got nominated. I also hope the 4th book will become translated soon. 

   

Enjoyed

• Each chapter is about a different person that wants to go back in time

• How bittersweet each chapter is 

• The concept of the entire book 

• The rules for going back in time are super unique and intriguing 

Disliked

• 
  

Quotes I love

• “It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a customer like you – someone totally set in your delusion of wanting to go back to the past.” - Hirai, Short story 1- The lovers

• Although no one from the cafe knew it, now she had added two extra contacts in her phone reserved for family: the cafe and Nagare’s mobile. Kazu continued to read out the email.- short story 4 talking about Hirai’s phones

5/5 ⭐️

Info

Other Books in Series- Before the coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Cafe (#2), Before you Memory Fades (#3), さよならも言えないうちに (hasn’t been translated yet, book #4)

Trigger warning- 

Spice level-  / 5 🌶

Numbers of pages- 213

Publish date-first published in Japan on December 2015, Published inEnglish September 2019

Awards-本屋大賞 Nominee(2017)

Genres- Fantasy, Sci-fi, Japanese Lit,