Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Title: Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Genre: Fiction
Published in: 2015 (Japan), 2020 (USA)
Age suggestion: Young adult and up
Spice-o-meter: Spice-free
My rating: 5 out of 5
My thoughts:
I rated this book 5 out of 5. I loved this book. It was actually a collection of 4 short stories, each of which had a different theme but they all fit together in the end. They were all beautifully woven together. I adored the writing style and the comfort the words brought to me. This book was just… soothing. There isn’t really another word for me to describe it as. Even with some of the sad topics in the book, this book was extremely calming for me to read. It felt good to read this.
The setting of the book was a cafe in Tokyo, Japan. This cafe was well known for the rumor that in it, you could travel back in time. In each of the short stories, different people decide to time travel to say things they wish they had said or meet people they wanted to meet. There were many rules that accompanied the time travel, such as not being able to leave the specific seat you traveled in, only being able to meet people who had visited the cafe, and (the biggest) was that you had to return to the present before your coffee got cold or you would be stuck out of time, not existing in the past or the present. Also, no matter what was said or done in your travels, it would not change the present.
The stories were broken up by themes: The Lovers, Husband and Wife, The Sisters, and Mother and Child. Each followed a different character who was traveling for their own reasons. Without spoiling the book for potential readers, there were some stories that had a more sad plot. As a warning, there was not-detailed death and a case of Alzheimer’s disease in this book, but there were no other triggers in this book.
This book may be for you if you like:
- Non-US based books
- Easy fiction reads
- Shorter books
- Time travel stories
The question this book draws is this: if you had the opportunity to travel back in time, even if it didn’t change the present, would you do it?
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