Reviews with content warning for Abandonment - Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Reviews tagging 'Abandonment'

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

38 reviews

_david_'s review against another edition

emotional hopeful mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

The ideas and story in this book are great. Yet the writing style bothered me so much that I will not rate the book higher than 3 stars.

There's so much overexplaining and repetition. To prevent spoilers, I'll make up an example: "Character A went to the toiler. Her seat was empty because character A had gone to the bathroom. [one paragraph later] Character B took character's A seat since it was empty because A had gone to the bathroom." It's as if the book is written in a way that you can jump in any chapter or paragraph randomly. It slows the pace way too much in a book that's quite short.

Something else in the writing style which bothered me was that every detail got the same amount of attention. It made the important and unique parts of the book feel less special.

Overall it felt like I was being mansplained to. The book told me how the characters felt and why. I didn't feel respected as a reader.

Something that's a more personal clash is that the tone of the book is very conservative. Not in a very explicit "women should do x" way, but the women are described in a very different way than the men. The most clear example is that one chapter is very pro-life and that women's outfits are constantly described in great detail, even when not relevant.

Content Warnings

geekmom's review

Go to review page

emotional hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes

4.0

This was a sweet and thoughtful story.

Content Warnings

vaekay's review

Go to review page

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a wonderful and enjoyable read... until the last section. Usually emotional and inspiring, I felt blindsided by the terrible understanding of female anatomy or pregnancy as well as what I perceived as multiple grammatical errors by the translator. I actually found the way they regarded Kei's pregnancy and coordinated death (to save her and Nagere's baby) to be absolutely ridiculous and the sort of fictitious bullshit that only a male author would dream of writing.

Content Warnings

kjm19's review

Go to review page

emotional lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.75

Before the coffee gets cold - is a cool idea for a book. Customers at the cafe can go either to the past or the future but must come back before the coffee gets cold (otherwise they end up like the woman in the white dress who remains a mystery from beginning to end). The cafe is timeless, always cool, and mysterious in many ways. It’s described too many times but I do like its description. An unorthodox, small place that seems to find the people who need it.

Characters were, unfortunately, pretty one dimensional and stereotypical. Also no cat???

The plot would start moving somewhere and then the author would jump into a deep dive about something vaguely relating to the current focus character. These deep dives would take you out of the natural flow of the story and was frustrating at times. E.g. when Kei, the pregnant owner of the restaurant, is about to go to the future to meet her unborn child there is a deep dive into Kazu, the current waitress, and her university art course.

I love the part where the woman in the white dress closes her book after the first section when a woman goes to the past to see her ex partner and it’s named ‘the lovers’. But this sort of thing is never replicated for future time travellers.

I wonder how much of an impact the translation has made on my impression of the book. I feel that it’s been clumsily written and oversimplified in its vocabulary and descriptions. Is it totally true to the original? Is it translated more to show a word for word meaning instead of implied meanings? I am intrigued.

Content Warnings