The most recent installment in the “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” series was published last August and is called “Before Your Memory Fades.” It is about a different coffee shop in Japan that also allows patrons to travel in time. While the stories are compelling - posing the kinds of questions real people might want answered if time travel were possible - their resolutions leave much to be desired.
Across the book’s roughly 270 pages, readers follow, among others, a nurse who goes back in time to visit her husband before he developed Alzheimer’s disease and a woman who travels to the future to talk to her unborn daughter.
The book is broken up into four tales of cafe patrons, all of whom use the time-traveling chair. Despite his efforts, however, and his penchant for messing up the Inspector's investigation, the lovely Henrietta and the impenetrable Inspector find themselves drawn to each other in most unsuitable ways.Maybe it’s my general inability to understand time travel as a narrative plot or maybe it’s my distaste for magical realism, but this novel didn’t live up to the hype. Meanwhile, she's still busy playing mother hen to her younger siblings, as well as to pesky neighborhood boy Stanley, who believes himself in love with her and keeps popping up in the most unlikely places, determined to keep Henrietta safe - even from the Inspector, if need be. When aloof Inspector Clive Howard appears on the scene, Henrietta agrees to go undercover for him-and is plunged into Chicago's grittier underworld.
Henrietta is eventually persuaded to take a job as a taxi dancer at a local dance hall - and just when she's beginning to enjoy herself, the floor matron turns up dead. It's 1935, but things still aren't looking up since the big crash and her father's subsequent suicide, leaving Henrietta to care for her antagonistic mother and younger siblings. Henrietta Von Harmon works as a 26 girl at a corner bar on Chicago's northwest side.
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