book review

What if you could travel back in time and see a loved one that’s dead? a boyfriend that’s dumped you? Relive the moment you got engaged? Before The Coffee Gets Cold explores time travel–but with a caveat. A few, actually.

First, patrons that visit the little Tokyo cafe can only relive moments that happened in the cafe. People who visit the cafe won’t change, and those that choose to go back in the past can’t go outside the cafe or change the people who visited the cafe that day. Then, even if they still choose to go back to the moment they’re thinking about, they have to say their piece entirely before the coffee gets cold–that is, the coffee that’s served to them right before they travel through time. And then, there’s the most important aspect of time travel in the cafe: no matter how much patrons may want it to, anything they do during their time in the past won’t change the present.