Fiction Reviews
The Time Hop Coffee Shop
(2025) Phaedora Patrick, Head of Zeus, pbk, £9.99, ISBN 978-1-035-91481-4
Before we get into the review proper I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed this book. In Sainsbury’s (and it will be in Sainsbury’s) you’ll find it with the ‘contemporary women’s fiction’ and I guarantee it won’t be up for the Hugos. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a romcom but by the end I was feeling the warm glow of a nice cup of coffee and an ending so satisfying it simply demanded to be enjoyed with a nice gooey slice of chocolate cake.
And yes, it’s got some sci-fi in it (if you believe the mystery coffee shop owner that lures the unhappy Greta into sampling her special blend). Or fantasy if you go for the more rational explanation for this improbable story and invoke magic. Consider it a crossover. A mash-up of genres which somehow works. A very satisfying blend.
First off, there’s no time-hopping as such, though that’s a great title. More place hopping, though the place being hopped to seems like a Technicolor 1950s dream. Greta Perks used to star in Maple Gold coffee commercials with her family: Jim and perfect child Lottie, a mix between Anthony Head’s Gold Blend ads and the Oxo family. But they’d been replaced in the ads and now acting work is drying up. And with Lottie now a sulky teenager Greta and Jim are on a break, soon to decide whether or not to make their separation permanent, Greta’s career and personal life are both nose-diving.
Then a business card with a white rabbit on it and a grey-haired old lady offer a solution. A mysterious pop-up coffee shop offering free brews with a magic twist promises to give Greta exactly what she wants. And what she wants is the perfect life of her TV family. So she’s transported to Mapleville, where the sun always shines, everyone smiles and the coffee and cakes are free. Lottie is the perfect child, cheerfully making pancakes for the whole family at breakfast (and clearing up) and excelling at piano recitals. Jim is attentive, successful and clearly devoted to the new Greta, whose clothes fit perfectly and whose hair is never out of place.
And soon Greta has to make a choice from which she can’t go back: perfect Mapleville or messy reality, with its uncertain future and fractured relationships.
This novel is coffee with at least three spoonfuls of sugar, but sometimes sugar’s a tasty treat, right? It references The Time Traveller’s Wife, so it knows the territory it aspires to, but it also points to Love Actually and that’s a closer fit – improbable romance with humour and a large, bright glacécherry perched triumphantly on top.
Mark Bilsborough
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