My audiobooks usually are for mere escapism. I only listen while doing household chores or getting ready for bed in the evening, and I do not mind simple or predictable stories or formulaic plots, as long as I like the characters and the audiobook keeps me entertained. However, "Das kleine Friesencafé" was too much to bear. This story got on my nerves from the first chapter. Why did I keep listening? Because I wanted to believe that there was a chance that it would get better.
The main character is Julia, a young women going on thirty, who works in her grandmother's flower shop and lives in an apartment provided by her grandmother. Her mother died when she was a baby, so when her grandmother finds a folder of paintings her mother did on the island of Föhr, Julia decides to travel there in order to visit all the places her mother painted.
Of course it is not a problem that Julia just leaves the flower shop for 8+ weeks, and of course she secures an affordable room on busy Föhr in high season at once!
Julia starts painting, hires an old barn where she exhibits her works, then she also bakes and serves drinks there, and of course love is on the horizon, too.
While the story would have been ok, I could simply not stand it because Julia is such a terrible character - entitled and spoiled, but at the same time naive and acting like a thirteen year-old, not like a woman. She expects everyone and everything to act in her favor all of the time, while patting herself on the back for doing what? Nothing! Her grandma helps her with all the things she wants to achieve time and time again, just for Julia to believe that she herself has moved mountains and that she has grown beyond herself.
On top of that, while I have never been to Föhr, I can safely say that Julia's hometown of Gelsenkirchen is painted in quite a wrong light. The cultural differences between the people from the Ruhr area and the north are exaggerated beyond measure. In the beginning, Julia acts as if she was on a dangerous mission to an "exotic" country, meeting "natives" from the "bush" that have just learned to speak German - excuse the colonial imagery, but that is exactly how she behaves. I cannot believe it, because I am quite sure that any German of her age has been to northern Germany at least once, with family or on a school trip, and if not, they would at least have seen a film or documentary and would not be surprised that the landscape is flat and that there are tides. How can she seriously be angry to find mud when there is low tide???

I wanted to give this book half a star, the lowest possible rating, but I decided to give half a star more for some nice descriptions of the island's landscape, and another half for a love story that happens in the second part of the book and that is rather sweet.

Needless to say, I will not continue with this series! ( )