Before the Coffee gets Cold

When a friend of mine recommended Before the Coffee Gets Cold - the story of a café with a secret time-travel seat - I was expecting an About Time-style romcom where ultimately the protagonist learns that it’s really about appreciating the time you have.

I was pretty wrong.

This is a collection of four short stories that revolve around the café’s visitors - visitors who’ve heard a rumour that in the café you can travel through time. There’s a set of rules that I’ll go over here, but I quite enjoyed this book. It’s charming and sweet and sad, but I also found it a little slow going at times.

So down to the rules-lawyering. You have to sit in a specific seat. The seat is occupied most of the day by a ghost who will curse you if you disrupt her, but she gets up to use the bathroom(?) once a day. About Time could never. The server will pour you a coffee and you have until it gets cold to return to the present time. You can’t leave the seat. Whatever happens in the past cannot change the present. It may change the future though, as we learn.

Here’s the thing. If I worked in a coffee shop with a magical time-travelling seat that was only available once a day, I’d be in that thing every day. I’d know the rules of that magic inside and out. The shop employees are strangely non-plussed about the whole situation. I’d need to know all the rules. Can you go into the future? What’s the furthest you could go back? Do you have to have been alive in the time you go back to? Can you just think of an individual and go back to a time when they were in? Can you pour your own coffee? What if you had it in a thermos instead of a mug? Or a mug designed to keep the heat in?

The lack of curiosity in pretty much everyone in the book was I think what kept me from enjoying it deeper. Now I’d need these questions answering because my brain is broken, but I wanted them to care a bit more.

It’s a fun book, but I think I expected more. There’s a series of maybe 3 of them, and I don’t think I’ll be picking up any of the sequels, perhaps it’s just not my cup of… Coffee.