BOOKING IT WITH EMMA
February 27, 2023
Before The Coffee Gets Cold is a novel by Toshikazu Kawaguchi and is a book containing three separate stories. These stories are of four different people who go back in time in this little café, but they can’t change anything about the present. They have to find out something that’ll tell them about the future. They also have a cup of coffee that they need to drink and finish before it gets cold.
I feel like this book would be better as separate little books. These stories aren’t connected, so, technically, you can read them in any order or read a story and read something else then come back to read the next one.
Personally, I didn’t like that about the book. It was hard to read, and it was really slow. The author also has a weird style of writing dialogue. He wouldn’t use double quotation marks; he would only use singular quotation marks.
The way he writes dialogue reminds me of Sally Rooney and how she didn’t use quotation marks at all, which kind of ticks me off, but I get it; it’s a stylistic thing.
Not having the dialogue formatted the way it should be made it harder for me to want to read it. I think if the stylistic things would change, I would reread it, but because of that, I really don’t want to and I didn’t particularly like it.
I give this book 2.5/5 stars. Let me know what you thought about it!
