Tales from the Cafe

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café that 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 . . .

–Storygraph

MY REVIEW

I enjoiyed this one more than its predecessor! I think it’s a lot like Chicken Soup for the Soul books, I’ll like some more than others and enjoy some stories more than others. This doesn’t follow anything terribly linear so I found that I could have just as easily read this one first or even book three. I do think that this gives more backstory to some of the characters and I enjoyed that a lot more. There is still something that’s *off* for me. I can’t put my finger on it but again clearly it wasn’t something that made me rate this book down; in fact it is higher up for me than the first one. It flows better than the stage play turned novel that its predecessor was. I also am not sure how I feel about this narrator. He’s not bad but sometimes it truly takes me out of the moment, I think with a female heavy cast maybe someone with a different voice/tone might have done better (for me, who knows maybe it’d be worse).

Again if you want some really heartfelt stories, maybe a little cry, and is low stakes, I’d recommend this one and Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

4/5 Cups of coffee from me, I don’t have much to add, it’s a pretty short book and feel free to harken back to my review for the first book, here:

Before the Coffee Gets Cold