Review: Wonderful and memorable.  FIVE STARS!!!!!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 17, 2014
This book consists of the blog written by Lorna Penfold of the first year she and her partner, Alan Parks, spent in Spain after moving there from Brighton. Lorna had been a dance teacher but she was finding continuing her career more and more difficult due to being diagnosed with Sarcoidosis. They decide to uproot to Southern Spain and try a new venture breeding alpacas. Now, I have read Alan's account of this, entitled 'Seriously Mum, What's An Alpaca?' and absolutely brilliant it is too! I noticed Lorna had also written a book so I bought it soon after but I had quite a gap in reading it after reading Alan's, thinking it might duplicate quite a bit. I couldn't have been more wrong. Decided to have a quick dip in it the other day and soon became totally addicted and read it in one day bar a few hours. It's nice easy reading, Lorna's bubbly and lively personality really comes across. It is often quite humorous and includes a generous amount of pictures and very good they are too. It seemed a little bit briefer than Alan's book but a very worthwhile read anyway, even if you have read 'Seriously' it gives another dimension to the couples' story. I am pretty sure that photos were absent in Alan's book so it's useful to see all the pictures of allsorts of things in this one. The book's structure is a mixture of Diary Format (January, February etc) but with each month having a few sub-headings/titles for things that are happening at the time. Lovely clear photos mixed in with the text. As well as some lovely humorous writing there are also some very traumatic times, some very powerful scenes, I had tears in my eyes reading some of them. It was amazing how it all still got to me again as I've already read Alan's account of many of the same circumstances. This book is told from Lorna's point of view so there are some differences, it still kept my attention and was addictive, not 'samey' at all. What a wonderful book, laughter and tears. Year one. I'm looking forward to year two Lorna-hope you are writing it now!