Ah, this started out so promising but ultimately it didn't deliver. It's the story of a young man who, after the death of his grandfather, decides to continue the café his grandfather used to run. At first things go less than smoothly, but then he encounters the fox god of the nearby shrine, who offers to help him him in return for pudding. The two of them become friends, and the café attracts more and more customers, and everything is peaceful until a representive from a land development company appears..
Hot guy who can turn into a gorgeous fox? Check. Said fox has cute habits like liking pudding? Check. The two main characters have a nice relationship with banter? Check. The two main characters have chemistry? Well, not so much...
The first thing I didn't like about this book was that the sentence feel really chunky, even to me. But I could have looked it past that for the overall nice and fun atmosphere of the first part. But the relationship of the two characters actually never feels like more than friendship, so the sex and BL part felt... unnecessary and forced, and that's not what I'm looking for in a BL novel. There were like two pages of minor angst, when I was starting to feel hopeful this might be going somewhere, but to no avail.
Plus, the reveal at the end had me going, "Really." It was a) unnecessary, b) felt extremely construed and c) didn't exactly ruin everything but made a lot of things about the main character look not quite as good. It might have worked better if we'd known that bit from the beginning. Although then there wouldn't have been any conflict at all, so.
I want to give this three stars because of the... actually, mostly because of the pudding, and the good hurt/comfort scene. But overall I'm sad to say it doesn't deserve this...