Title: Before The Coffee Gets Cold
Series: Before The Coffee Gets Cold #1
Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
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.
Score: ★★1/2☆☆☆
Review:What happens when a cafe has a magical secret, to allow you go into the past, not to make changes, but maybe to help change yourself... These short stories are very touching, even heart wrenching, and all take place in a mysterious hole in the wall cafe. The rules of the magic, and scenarios, is a unique concept, very quaint, and intriguing. But as much as I enjoied the short stories as individual wholes, there were a few issues that made it difficult for me to rate. There are definitely a few things lost in translation, cultural differences, and the pacing is extreamly slow and tiresome at parts. It felt like each story was purposefully written to just be longer, repeating the same thing different ways, explaining the cafe's rules and environment over and over ( even within the same chapter) and things like that. It really drug the book on unessesarially. Also despite the chapters having differnt little main stories, the narritive would flip to a completely different character, both relavent and irrelevant from the main story it was telling, and it threw off the flow, even the slow one it had at that, of the narrative. --- I think if it was trimmed of all the excess it easily could have been only -100+ pages, not 300+, and a much higher rating. I am almost finished the book, but as of the review im close to DNF'ing it and im on the 3rd of 4 stories. I bought this apart of the audiobook boxset of the first 3 novels (I do not know if I will continue with all of them or use them as a whitenoise sleep aid).
Read my Review on Fable