Before I Forget: A Review Of The ‘Before the Coffee Gets Cold’ Series

Before I Forget: A review of the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series

Aleksandar Sekulovski

If you’re looking for a simple autumn read that you can have a crack at while having brekky, I can recommend a cosy series about a time-travelling café that provides its customers the closure they so desperately seek (with some caveats).

As fond as I’ve grown to become of this series, Before the Coffee Gets Cold has a tendency to spill the same exposition on your lap – time and time again – until the stain it leaves permanently alters your pants into a bistre-brown. I also found myself feeling infantilised as the implications of characters’ actions were clearly spelled out in unnecessary detail – page after page – as if the author feared I was a sociopath that didn’t fully grasp human emotions. Each chapter also follows the same tried and true formula – over and over – to the point that I think this book series would actually fit better as a weekly television show (so please, read this series a chapter at a time). There’s also the issue of the dialogue feeling weirdly stilted, though I chalked that up to the language barrier and translation work.

Despite all my issues, I still found this series of books quite endearing. Each book sets up shop and lets each character come and go as they want as the ever-vigilant staff attend their every need. Of course some characters had stronger stories than others but I followed through them all to find the closure they each sought, because, despite the author’s insistence to the contrary, I do feel empathy for names on a page. Each chapter across each book is its own self-contained story and every act wraps up nicely enough that I never felt dissatisfied with the time I had spent.

Although, I can’t say that my own memory will be able to vividly recall everything, I found the first book in the series, Before the Coffee Gets Cold (2015) to be the most memorable and most moving. As the first in the series, it outlines the recipe that each subsequent entry will follow, where every character is not just agents in their own stories but also important figures in the stories of those around them, blending everyone’s experiences in one place. The second book in the series, Tales From The Café (2020), was quite unmemorable, save for its final chapter. The same can be said for the third book, Before Your Memory Fades (2018), but both books still follow the formula faithfully and are able to invoke the same emotions I felt in the first (though to a lesser degree as I began to build a tolerance and familiarity to the series). The fourth, Before We Say Goodbye (2021), explores its characters through a first-person perspective, which I found a little unwelcome and off-putting from the blueprint set by earlier entries. In the most recent and fifth entry in the series Before We Forget Kindness (2024), I was treated to my favourite chapter in the entire collection – ‘The Valentine’ – which follows an unrequited love that could only be expressed in the past, when the regret of having never done so has already festered. It’s the formula blended to an intensity that could overcome the tolerance I had built up from so much exposure to the same story beats.

Despite its many shortcomings, my taste adapted to Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s familiar blend of story elements, which kept me coming back again and again as I sought to relive the same high the first read gave me, like a bad show I’m addicted to.