The second book in this series was losing me, but this is the absolute nail in the coffin. I only avoided DNFing it out of stubbornness. Before Your Memory Fades is the franchise location of an idea that already struggled with execution and expansion. Literally. We are introduced to a second café with the same time travel magic, many of the same characters, and the same increasingly exhausted tropes of women dying of illness just to convince other people to look on the bright side. Time and time again, themes of gender arise in this series that reveal the extremely shallow understanding of women the author has, with self sacrifice to explicitly support a less talented male love interest being a theme in a full half of the stories in this book.

If you are familiar with the film studies phenomenon of "dead wife footage" (which I will now over explain in a condescending way that reveals I don't trust you to put a simple 2+2 together for a rather simple concept, oh hey like Kawaguchi does seven times a chapter!), where a dead wife or girlfriend is remembered, either in home videos, dreams, or memories shot in brighter, more nostalgic colors, showing her to be carefree and loving and always centering the protagonist above herself usually to the point of lacking any discernable personality herself beyond "innocent and beautiful," you've already read this book. Put it down, perhaps search up Caitlyn Rylie's TikTok about this trope, and move on with your day.

Continuing with sexist tropes, the women in this book

lose their magic when they get pregnant. 

This is a tired trope, and the book makes no notice of it. It appears handwaved away as all the other arbitrary rules that the author established for the café are. This book does include a quick moment to breakdown one of the main rules of the time travel magic, but it feels defensive, like the author is trying to pretend his magic system is more considered and coherent than it is.

Finally, this book is extremely redundant. Not just story to story, but page to page, sometimes paragraph to paragraph, the exact same things get repeated over and over. It would be one thing if this was to give context only to things that occurred in the earlier books, which in the book's defense does occur, but it repeats everything two or three times minimum. For such a short book it boggles my mind to say this, but this book would be leagues better if it had one third the word count it does.

For "Baby's First Book About Grief," maybe you could get something out of this. If you're slightly introspective at all, have ever experienced grief yourself, or just don't enjoy three pages of incorrect analysis about the "To Be or Not To Be" monologue from Hamlet (wild to get a reference about suicide so wrong in a book with themes of death and suicide, though the book has a very elementary understanding of both so what did I expect), read something else.

This third volume was the saddest of the series so far, but I loved the change of scene and the device of the book to tie the stories together. It is also nice to see the recurring characters continue to grow.

Lovely addition to the series

i don’t understand how Kawaguchi continues to write such phenomenal books despite them having the same layout and overall themes. they hit every time and never fail to make me sob. the character development is amazing and the dialogue is so good too. this is definitely a must-read series. i would literally read Kawaguchi’s grocery list. 
please read the trigger warnings!!!