It starts out as kind of a cute book, about an man who is trying to start a tea shop in a small town that no one really wants, hampered not only by the resistance to the tea shop, but also by the fact that his wife is divorced (because she started having an affair with him), so the town doesn't like them as a couple. Also he's not very good at much of anything. It could have been an entertaining tale of bumblingness, but there's a sort of undercurrent of unpleasantness surrounding everything. The characters are unlikeable, but not sufficiently clever or interesting to compensate for the unlikeableness. 

I gave up reading the book when a cake cook joins. This cook is really pretty, so the men all love her and the women all hate her, and she knows exactly what she is doing and deploys it to her advantage while pretending to be innocent and naive. It's clear that she's going to add sexual tension to the marriage and wreak havoc with her womanly wiles and it's such a stupid, boring trope (oooooh, sexy women causing trouble!) being deployed in a book that is already kind of boring and unpleasant, so I'm just not here for it anymore.