On "Before the Coffee Gets Cold": A Book Review

Title: Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot)
Genre: Sci-fi

About the book...
In Japan there is small, sleepy, out of the way cafe named Funiculi Funicula that has been brewing coffee for hundreds of years. Here under very specific rules time travel is a possibility and four individuals will seek to find peace and comfort in visiting the cafe in the past and future.

What I think...
I love time travel books and this one was different than most, but definitely in a positive way.

It was quirky and humorous without being over the top and struck a nice balance between the sad and hopeful elements in the story. One aspect I really liked was that it was much more subtle in terms of the science behind the time travel, with Kawaguchi letting the the reasoning behind why the cafe works the way it does remain a mystery. 

As with any time travel novels there are rules, in this case, however, they are not your typical ones, a point I found refreshing. The primary ones are that you have to be in a specific chair in the cafe and that you must dink the cup of coffee served before it get cold. The reader is delightfully reminded of these two rules throughout the book with the presence of a ghost who occupies the particular chair for most of the day (she gets up once a day to use the restroom) because she did not remember to drink her coffee before it got cold and additionally serves as an interesting minor character in terms of multiple interactions between other characters.

The characters, interestingly given the amount of detail given in the text, aren't all that fleshed out, but, once again, this somehow works really well with the novel as a whole and makes the reasoning behind the time travel for each of the four individuals richer.

At times it has an air of a script about it, almost as though you're reading stage directions, which makes sense as Kawaguchi is a playwright (his play of the same title won the grand prize at the Suginami Drama Festival). I really don't mind this type of writing and find it a nice change of pace.

To sum it all up...
A bittersweet and quirky time travel novel that is highly enjoyable.  ♥