[Fiction / Fantasy / Contemporary] What would you change if you could go back in time?
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
This started slow for me, but I did eventually get into it. It could easily be staged as a play, and I think the time travel piece is somewhat interesting (though, the author does try to get around the inevitable plot holes of a time travel story with a series of unexplained "rules").
More of a 3.5, but pretty good.
Sweet, a simply staged play or radio drama, a very constrained time travel premise, seems it could have been edited to be a tighter novella, but the loose threads aren't too frayed.
A cafe that serves strong enough coffee to transport one through time.
A quirky premise failed by such stilted writing. Kill your darlings the adage goes, but by that metric this is post-genocidal, hack-like storycraft.
Due to the international attention this book has attracted, I found myself wondering if it was a translation issue. Lo and behold - it was adapted into a novel from a theatrescript, where a significant amount of necessary emotion and artistry is delegated to the acting cast.
My fundamental problem with this book is that in converting "BTCGC" into a novel (for more $$$), not enough of that emotion and artistry has been added into the text. Characters' emotions race from zero to 100 in the space of a paragraph. Descriptions of setting and character appear to have been adapted directly from the writer's notes.
And yet, underneath it all is a charming and easy-to-read …
A cafe that serves strong enough coffee to transport one through time.
A quirky premise failed by such stilted writing. Kill your darlings the adage goes, but by that metric this is post-genocidal, hack-like storycraft.
Due to the international attention this book has attracted, I found myself wondering if it was a translation issue. Lo and behold - it was adapted into a novel from a theatrescript, where a significant amount of necessary emotion and artistry is delegated to the acting cast.
My fundamental problem with this book is that in converting "BTCGC" into a novel (for more $$$), not enough of that emotion and artistry has been added into the text. Characters' emotions race from zero to 100 in the space of a paragraph. Descriptions of setting and character appear to have been adapted directly from the writer's notes.
And yet, underneath it all is a charming and easy-to-read series of short stories. I would not hesistate to see it performed, although I have no appetite to read this book again in it's current form.
I'm not going to comment on the writing because this was a translation.
This was definitely not something that I usually read but I enjoyed it. Being magical realism I hadn't expected obviously that we'd delve deeper into the whole time travel aspect. The characters were incorporated well into the story. I liked how everyone was involved. I liked all of the stories except for Fumiko & Goro's only because of the stereotypical portrayal of the characters. This was nothing too extraordinary, though.
A quirky, bittersweet time travel story. I felt like this novel spelled things out too much. It could have been so magical if the author had trusted his readers! But the premise was cool and I loved the characters.
