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    Snowball Oranges: One Mallorcan Winter
    Unavailable
    Snowball Oranges: One Mallorcan Winter
    Unavailable
    Snowball Oranges: One Mallorcan Winter
    Audiobook9 hours

    Snowball Oranges: One Mallorcan Winter

    Written by Peter Kerr

    Narrated by James Bryce

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "Look! The weather has come from Scotland to welcome you to Mallorca," beamed Senor Ferrer. To our new neighbour's delight and my dismay, a cold mantle of white was rapidly transforming our newly acquired paradise in the sun into a bizarre winterscape of citrus Christmas trees, cotton wool palms and snowball oranges.


    It's the stuff of dreams. A Scottish family giving up relative sanity and security to go and grow oranges for a living in a secluded valley in the mountains of the Mediterranean island of Mallorca.


    But dreams, as everyone knows, have a nasty habit of not turning out quite as intended. Being greeted by a freak snowstorm is only the first of many surprises and experiences, and it isn't long before they realise that they have been sold a bit of a lemon of an orange farm by the wily previous owners.


    However, laughter is the best medicine when confronted with consuming a local dish of rats, the live-chicken-down-a-chimney technique of household maintenance, and attending a shotgun wedding. The colourful set of Mallorcan neighbours (including an eccentric old goatherd who eats worm-ridden oranges to improve his sex life) restores the family's faith in human nature and helps them adapt to a new and unexpectedly testing life in this deceptively simple idyll of rural Spain.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSummersdale Publishing Audio
    Release dateMar 15, 2016
    ISBN9781848390614
    Unavailable
    Snowball Oranges: One Mallorcan Winter
    Author

    Peter Kerr

    Peter Kerr, the best-selling Scottish author, was born in Lossiemouth, Morayshire, in 1940, and now lives in East Lothian. His award-winning 'Snowball Oranges' series of five Mallorcan-based books have sold in large numbers worldwide and have been translated into twelve languages. They recount the often hilarious adventures experienced by Peter and his family while running a small orange farm on the Spanish island during the 1980s.

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    Reviews for Snowball Oranges

    3.5/5

    19 ratings1 review

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    • 3/5
      enjoy reading travel books when the British weather is cold and miserable and `Snowball Oranges' seemed like the perfect read for transporting me to the Med. On the face of it, it seemed to have likeable enough characters and the writing was decent- but it just took me ages to get through- at least 3 days. I'm a fast reader and usually would have finished this in around three or four hours, but I had to keep picking it up and putting it down again when I found my attention wandering. Unfortunately I never became fully immersed in Peter and Ellie's story which was a real shame.The book follows Scotsman Peter, his wife Ellie and their two children, Charlie and Sandy, who up-sticks and take on an orange farm in the secluded Mallorcan mountains. They quickly come to realise however, that their idyllic dream might not be quite what they had hoped and that they have a lot to learn about the Mallorcan way of life.Filled with anecdotes and amusing stories, it was admittedly a pleasant enough way to pass the time, though I just didn't find Peter to be a wholly engaging storyteller if I'm honest. I also felt that (maybe because I read so many books like this?) the book was a bit predictable in places with the ex-pats getting ripped off by the locals and trying to ingratiate themselves with the neighbours. This grew a bit tedious after a while. I also can't help feeling that the Kerr's were just very naive in just accepting the farm at face value without doing any proper research into what they were ultimately taking on- no wonder they had so many problems with it, along with the irritating Mallorcan bureaucracy which meant that things always got rectified later, rather than sooner!For me, one of the main sticking points with this book was the Spanish words thrown into a sentence casually, intermingled with the British ones. It just didn't feel necessary. Kerr himself explains that his Spanish is basic, though he can exchange words with his neighbours. Why bother having half a sentence in English and then random Spanish words chucked in just for the sake of it? Was it to impress the reader or something? It felt very clunky and again, irritated me.Overall, this was an easy enough read, hence the three stars, but I just didn't enjoy it as much as other travel writers works I've read in the past- prime examples being Annie Hawes', Carol Drinkwater and Peter Mayle to name but a few. I would probably try another one of Kerr's books if I came across it in a charity shop, but I wouldn't be in any immediate hurry to hunt one out. *This review also appears on Amazon.co.uk*