Day: September 15, 2025

Book Review – Before the Coffee Gets Cold

What if you could travel back in time—but only for the duration of a single cup of coffee?

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a short novel, or novella if you wish to use that term that reminds you about regrets and how they can influence your actions. The novel is about a small, tucked-away Tokyo café where time travel is possible, but with strict rules. You can revisit the past, but you can’t change it. You must sit in a specific seat. And most importantly, you must return before your coffee gets cold. As a teacher and a parent, I am used to drinking cold coffee and how people actually drink warm coffee at work is a mystery to me!

Thank you Julia for the loan

The novel unfolds through four interconnected stories, each exploring themes of love, loss, regret, and reconciliation. The characters—a woman hoping to reconnect with a lover, a sister grieving her sibling, a mother longing for her child—are ordinary people facing emotionally charged moments. Kawaguchi’s writing is simple and understated, allowing the emotional depth of each story to shine through.

Unlike a novel I read recently (will not name names but ole Mate Danny), Kawaguchi uses provoking language and variated sentence structure to evoke emotion in the reader. This book, written with quiet clarity and emotional depth, avoids dramatic flourishes or unnecessary embellishments, instead offering a straightforward, sincere narrative that invites reflection without demanding attention.

If you could revisit a moment, not to change it, but to understand it better—would you?

Books like this remind us that stories have the power to shift our perspective. They can make us pause and reflect on our own choices, relationships, and regrets. Before the Coffee Gets Cold encourages readers to consider how they treat others, how they communicate, and what truly matters in the fleeting moments of everyday life. It’s a quiet nudge to be more present, more thoughtful, and more intentional.

Perfect for readers who enjoy reflective, character-driven stories, Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a gentle reminder that while we can’t rewrite the past, we can reshape how we carry it forward. It’s a book best read slowly, perhaps with a warm drink in hand and a quiet space to think.

Book Review – James by Percival Everett

Percival Everett’s James is a profound act of literary reclamation. Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, the novel reimagines Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim—now James—a character whose voice was historically muffled by the hidden curriculum of Twain’s original novel. In Twain’s version, Jim is viewed as a sympathetic bystander, sidelined. His views filtered through Huck’s lens, his speech distorted to fit white expectations. The novel taught generations to empathise with Jim, but not to truly hear him. Because why would the slave Jim, have anything important to say?

Everett changes that. In James, the enslaved man is literate, philosophical, and quietly radical. He reads Locke and Voltaire, not as a literary flourish, but as a declaration of intellectual agency. He is articulate, intelligent and his perspicuity makes him a clear hero. James performs the dialect expected of him not because he lacks education, but because survival demands performance. Exposing his intelligence would have only led to his downfall. This inversion is powerful—it exposes the performative nature of race in literature and life and reminds us how often people of colour have been forced to speak in ways that comfort white audiences.

The novel also speaks to a broader truth: for much of literary history, the voices of people of colour have been excluded from the mainstream. The canon has long been shaped by a narrow lens—English-speaking, white, and often male. Even today, the global literature market remains dominated by English-language publishing and a WASP-centric worldview, making it difficult for diverse stories to break through. James stands out not only for its literary brilliance but for its bold challenge to that status quo. This is especially resonant in the current socio-political climate in the United States, where history itself is being rewritten based on political ideologies. School curricula are being reshaped, books banned, and narratives sanitised. In this context, Everett’s decision to retell Huckleberry Finn from James’s perspective is not just literary—it’s political.

It’s a reminder that storytelling is power, and that reclaiming voice is an act of resistance.

Everett’s prose is sharp, lyrical, and laced with irony. He doesn’t just give James a voice—he gives him agency, complexity, and dignity. James is not a corrective to Twain’s novel, but a conversation with it. It invites readers to reconsider not just the stories we read, but the structures that decide which stories are told, and which are silenced.