Before the Coffee Gets Cold: A Heartfelt Novel Exploring Regret, Redemption and Closure From a Magical Café (Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series, 1)

Why did this book have me crying in an airport?

Down a small alleyway in the heart of Tokyo, there’s an underground café that’s been serving carefully brewed coffee for over a hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers its customers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time. The rules, however, are far from simple: you must sit in one particular seat, and you can’t venture outside the café, nor can you change the present. And, most important, you only have the time it takes to drink a hot cup of coffee—or risk getting stuck forever. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of traveling to another time: a heartbroken lover looking for closure, a nurse with a mysterious letter from her husband, a waitress hoping to say one last goodbye and a mother whose child she may never get the chance to know. Heartwarming, wistful and delightfully quirky, Before the Coffee Gets Cold explores the intersecting lives of four women who come together in one extraordinary café, where the service may not be quick, but the opportunities are endless.

4 🌟 I was a bit confused starting this book as I didn't realize it was 4 different interconnected short stories. I think it may have lost a little something in translation. It was repetitive in stating the rules.. Even within a story to the point of being a bit annoying. I did get teary eyed in the 2nd and 4th story. The overall theme of the stories were easy to get, even if the telling of them fell a little flat. I also think the culture difference between the author and myself led to some of the phrasing and tone of passages to just be odd for me.

Maybe if I hadn't read Mizuki Tsujimura's "Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon" right before this, I would have enjoyed it more, but Lost Souls, which has a similar concept, was just gorgeous and layered and clever in ways that this book fell a little flat for me. It's definitely cozy and will make a lot of people feel good, but it just made me sleepy, and I found some of the characters unlikable.

The story can be good, but the repetitiveness of the novel can also be very grating at times.

My primary complaint about the story is that every person who sits in the chair is either a woman looking for resolution with a male love interest, a woman who resigns herself to adopting a family business she had avoided for years, and a woman willingly proceeding with a deadly pregnancy…yikes to that pattern.

That said, it was a quick read. I found the last few chapters easier to get through than the first, but the characters were the antonym of relatable and if there is an overall allegory here then I totally missed it.