Friday, September 30, 2022

Book Review: Tales From The Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi


The only reason I read the second installment of Before The Coffee Gets Cold is my curiosity about the resident ghost in the cafe.

In the seat that takes you back to the past is a woman in a white dress. She had gone to the past to meet her dead husband and failed to return to the present. If you try to forcefully remove her from the seat, she curses you. You can only occupy the seat when she leaves the seat to use the toilet once a day. Yes, this ghost uses the toilet!!

While I did find out the identity of the ghost, it was just a few short sentences. The author did not explain why she failed to return. The reader is left to assume that she lost track of time and her coffee went cold.

I will not go into detail what the theme of the book is about. You can check out my review of the first book here

The second book has the same flaws as the first book, excruciating repetitive details of clothes, appearances and re-introduction of characters, with permanent thought bubbles above their heads. 

The method would have worked better with a play than a novel. The actors could step up to the front of the stage and whisper their thoughts to the audience.

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Book Review: Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Book Review: Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi


 If you could go back to the past, who would you want to meet? That is what a basement cafe in a back alley in Tokyo offers. A chance to go back to the past to meet someone for the last time.

Before you think "oh, another time-travel book", let me tell you this is not your regular time-travel piece. There are four rules in this time-travel cafe.

First, no matter what you do while you're in the past it will not change the present. Even if you warned the person who had died in a car accident to avoid a certain route, that person would still die by some other means. 

Second, you may only meet people who had been to the cafe. 

Third, there is only one seat in the cafe that takes you back to the past. You must remain seated in that seat the entire time you're back in the past. If your butt so much as leaves the chair by just 0.001 millimeter you would be wrenched back immediately to the present. And since you have only one chance to travel back to the past in your whole life, you wouldn't want to waste that chance.

Fourth, you are transported to the past when the coffee is poured and returned to the present when you finished the coffee. You must return to the present before the coffee gets cold, or you would turn into a ghost.

Now, with those premises, the book sounds like fun, right? That's what I thought. Unfortunately, the author failed to deliver. I skipped through more pages than I could count. 

Before The Coffee Gets Cold has four stories that are interconnected. If I have to liken the stories to food, then the plots are mere side dishes. 

The main dishes are long narratives of repetitive description of the cafe, undue emphasis on the clothes and appearance of the characters and what everyone is thinking. It is like everyone inside the cafe has a permanent thought bubble up there in the air.

Now, if those thoughts help move the story along, fine, I can accept that even if it leaves out all the mystery. But they don't. Not all of them, at any rate.

But the worst is that each story re-introduces the characters, the cafe and how things are done in great detail. I felt insulted. It was like as if the author thought his readers have Alzheimer's and needed reminding. Either that or his readers are exceptionally slow and dim.

The only thing I was curious about in the book was the identity of the resident ghost in the cafe, a woman dressed in white. And it was that curiosity that compelled me to read the second installment, Tales of the Cafe. 

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Thursday, September 29, 2022

Book Review: The It Girl by Ruth Ware


The It Girl is another whodunnit by Ruth Ware. Six Oxford University students became fast friends during their first term, and one of them is dead by the second term. Murdered. 
The story is told from two timelines, alternating between "before" and "after" the murder.

Unlike many of Ruth Ware's books which grips you from page one, The It Girl was a bit slow to build up. But once the pace picked up, it was hard to put down. I finished the book in two days.

Hannah, the protagonist, was hounded by the media over the murder of her best friend (it was her testament that put a suspect behind bars) but instead of taking a stand and telling them to buzz off, she went into hiding. 

A decade later, a reporter found her at her work place and convinced her to start recalling her memories of what she saw on the night of the murder.

As she dug deeper and deeper into the past, it began to look like one of her friends was the murderer. Or was it someone else? Ruth Ware is really good at the game of casting doubts on every character. :-)



Book Review: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jekins Reid

After the somber Midnight Library by Matt Haig I wanted something frivolous. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo seems to be as good as any. A Hollywood superstar had engaged an unknown reporter to write her authorized biography. How serious can a book about one's seven husbands be, right?

Wrong. A few pages in, and I realised my mistake. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is far from frivolous. Evelyn Hugo may be rich and successful but she could not be with the only person she was in love with. Not without losing everything she had worked for.

The narrative was rich in details without going overboard. Some people may find the LGBT scenes in the book uncomfortable, and if they do, they should just skip those parts. It didn't bother me as my principle has always been not to judge and to each their own. 

Throughout the book one question continued to raise its head, why did Evelyn Hugo choose an unknown reporter to tell her life story to? The answer wasn't what I had anticipated, I had imagined a variety of reasons but the author managed to surprise me. I like that. I've always liked unexpected explanations.

At the end of the book, I had one burning question: is this an unauthorized biography of Elizabeth Taylor? My mum was a fan of Elizabeth Taylor and I had heard all about Taylor's eight marriages to seven men. So I googled.

What I discovered was, the book was indeed inspired by Elizabeth Taylor's life. Reid, the author, said it was inspired by Elizabeth Taylor & Ava Gardner's life. Little wonder the book read like a fictionalised true story.



 

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Book Review: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig


In life, there are many choices, and within a choice, there are many other choices. It is like a tree with many branches within a branch, or a road with many forks within a fork. 

Once you have made a choice, do not look back with regret at the choices you hadn't made. Instead, make the best of it, without any expectations. For without expectations, you will have no disappointment. And without any disappointment or regret, you will have no depression. 

That is the lesson I took away from The Midnight Library. No expectation = no disappointment or regret = no depression.

In the book, Nora Seed was very depressed, she regretted all the choices she hadn't made as well as the ones she had made. Her life was not what she had expected it to be and she felt she could not do anything right, not even a simple thing like caring for her cat. She wanted to end her life.

In between life and death, she came upon a library. Within that library, the shelves of books went on forever. Each book contained a life that could have been hers had she made that choice. If she found a life that she liked, she could stay in that life. If she didn't like it, she would be transported back to the library to choose another life.

In that suspended state, Nora lived various different lives, trying them out to see if she would like to live one of them. And in doing that, she began to appreciate her original life. It is the book to go to if we ever need to be reminded to be content and happy with our choices and what we have.



Sunday, September 11, 2022

Book Review: Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

Before We Were Yours is not only a gripping book from page one, it is also one of those profound, thought-provoking books that made me check with Mr Google if the events mentioned were true the moment I finished it. The narrative was so detailed and complicated that it couldn't have been born out of an author's imagination. It was too real. And it turned out that my instinct was right. 

While the book is a fictional work, it was based on the notorious scandals that involved the Tennessee Children's Home Society operated by Georgia Tann. 

On the surface the Tennessee Children's Home Society is an orphanage, but in reality it was an organization that kidnapped children from their homes to be placed for adoption by wealthy and powerful families. Newborn babies were also stolen from their mothers in the hospitals. The mothers would be told their babies were dead. Blond and blue-eyed children were targeted as they were in demand. (Google up both Tennessee Children's Home Society and Geogia Tann to read more about the true events.)

The story in the book is told from two timelines, one as a flashback to 1939, from the viewpoint of Rill Foster who was snatched from her shanty boat home together with her four siblings when she was twelve years old. The other is in the present day, told from the point of view of Avery Stafford, the daughter of a prominent Senator who visited a nursing home and was mistaken for someone else by a resident there.

The two timelines merged towards the end of the book as Avery dug into the past of her family.

Although Avery Stafford was the central character, the voice of Rill Foster was more compelling, and the events more poignant. One has to be made of rock not to be moved by the events that Rill and her siblings had to go through. 

That said, it is a book with a satisfactory ending, not one that left you weeping buckets of tears (I hate those).