Before the Coffee Gets Cold

       

Title: Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Series: Before the Coffee Gets Cold #1

Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Publisher: Hanover Square Press, November 17, 2020

Pages: 272

Genre: Magical Realism

In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time.

Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.

Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?

I love how much this book makes me think. Is the cafe magic? Is it the coffee? Is it the family, or the women specifically? I love it. This is a beautiful modern fairy tale. 

I really enjoyed how the implementation of the rules set the frame of each of their stories. And how it fit so nicely into the importance of tradition and ritual of a coffee service. You see this cafe, and all of its workers and regulars in little snips. You see them on their good days and their bad days. It's really human at its heart, flawed and beautiful and hopeful. 

Ratings

Stars: 5/5