Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a nice concept, but ultimately not particularly well-executed. I can imagine it was much more effective as the stage-play it was adapted from. I’m unsure if it was a facet of the translation, or the original text, but the writing felt extremely clinical, and I was unable to become emotionally invested in any of the characters. Despite the shortness of this novel, there’s also a lot of unnecessary repetition, which I think might be a relic from its previous medium.

The female characters felt particularly flat, revolving mostly around the men in their lives, and their roles as wives and mothers. As other people have observed, there’s a highly conservative undertone in each “lesson,”- women mostly come away from their time travel experiences feeling that they should sacrifice their independence and personal goals. This was an extremely uncomfortable trend, and was also gratingly heavy-handed, and it definitely felt like the writer was up on a soapbox more than once.

This is a fairly quick read, and given how popular it’s remained over the last few years, I’m happy to have read it just so that I can form an opinion on it, but I couldn’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone else. I struggled to find a reason to give it two-stars, but ultimately, I couldn’t remember anything I liked about this book enough to justify it.

P.S. If you know me, you know nothing annoys me more than contradictory, poorly-considered time travel rules. I was extremely hopeful when the rules were set out, but then they were violated anyway. This is more of a pet peeve than anything else, but I know it’s not exclusive to me, so if it’s something that bothers you too, you might not want to pick up this book.