The book Tales From the Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, the second of four in the series Before the Coffee Gets Cold, is one that will make you feel warm and fuzzy inside and make it difficult to put down. It revolves around a small but legendary cafe located in a back alley in Tokyo Japan. The aspect of it being legendary comes from the legend that you can travel in time in this cafe. Of course, traveling in time is a dangerous task therefore there are rules to this action. For one, the only way to travel in time is to sit in a chair occupied throughout the day by a ghost that only moves from its seat to go to the bathroom once a day. Once in the seat, the rest of the rules will be explained: 2) You cannot leave your seat once in the future or past, or else you will immediately be brought back to the present. 3) No matter how hard you try you cannot change the present. 4) You can only talk to people who have visited the cafe. 5) Your time in the future or past begins once the coffee gets poured and you must return to the present before your coffee gets cold. Knowing these rules the book follows 4 stories of people who have gone to the past/future. This book is one of my absolute favorites. It's emotional but happy and the way it is written is just wonderful. When reading you can tell how much thought and effort they put into every sentence. The author also incorporated a little sci-fi in the form of time travel really well. It wasn't just like thrown in there and it fit the story really well, it made it feel more like a cozy sci-fi rather than a robots-in-space kind of sci-fi. The book can at times get pretty emotional so if you are not looking for something like that I wouldn’t recommend it. The story could also get a bit boring if you are looking for something more fast-paced and more adventure-like, this book does not contain that it's more people having conversations rather than fighting aliens. I thought it was a pretty easy read based on the fact that it didn’t take a lot of brain power to understand but it was still a difficult book to put down. I definitely recommend this series if you want to get out of a reading slump but to also start with the first in the first book in the series which is called Before the Coffee Gets Cold as I made the mistake of starting with the second one. To conclude, Tales From the Cafe is a wonderful book that I highly recommend to read especially if you enjoy books such as Poison for Breakfast by Lemony Snicket and other cozy books like that.
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