Title: Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Published: September 19th, 2019
Publisher: Picardo
Summary:
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.
Review:
I had to check Goodreads before writing this review, and those reviewers either loved the book or hated the book. I'm in the first group of people. I loved it and had so much fun reading this book.
I have been having a hard time putting my thoughts and feelings about this book into actual sentences that people can understand. For some reason, it was very difficult for this book.
The book revolves around a cafe and the staff there. The cafe itself is not fancy or expensive. It is a rather humble cafe with a not very good location. The cafe has no windows, and no matter what seasons it is, its temperature is always cold. The staff consists of one man and two ladies, and they are all family.
The staff itself is special. First, you have the man. He is tall and quiet, though it is evident that he loves his job. His wife is a lively, talkative, and happy woman, though fragile and often sick. Last is her sister, a girl who often doesn’t show her feelings, and she is the only one the Ghost listens and communicates with.
Yes, this book does not only involve time travel but also ghosts and lots of rules!
I loved the book. I truly did. I finished it within two days, I sped through like my life depended on it. I even annotated the things I liked and found peculiar interesting. The way the author described the characters was good, their appearance did not have to be beautiful, but the way he described their personality unfold made them beautiful. We did not get to know the staff before the book's second part and slowly and steadily be introduced to other characters. He took his time explaining their pasts and the reason why some wanted to time travel. Some characters did not even seem important before later into the book.
The ghost caught my attention quickly after learning about her, as she is not a regular ghost. Her existence is purely based on rules. She is both a robot and a living being at the same time. There are moments in the book where she seems almost alive and conscious, breaking her pattern and making me wonder if she is actually aware of everything around her.
Another character that I noticed, was one of the employees. She is described as a rather timed and forgettable girl. Though, the ghost has chosen her as the only person being able to somewhat communicate with her. What about her that makes her special is still unknown to me, it might be her ability to control her feelings, but as for now, it will remain a question.
I will definitely read the sequel, and maybe some of my questions will be answered.
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