The book is dark, contains a mystery, and includes a couple deaths - and prominently features sports. Wifey and I have lamented the lack of 'boy literature,' books that appeal to boys without being fantasy, TV-related, or comic books, and this is probably the best fit I've seen recently. The mysterious events which drive the story all have natural explanations, although their influence on Paul's life conspire to force him to grow, to see things for what they are, and stand up for himself against the schools, his peers, and his family, for what he knows as the truth. Although nothing in the book is outright supernatural, Bloor describes the unnatural Lake Windsor with all the other-worldliness a transplanted teenager would see in it, thick glasses or not. A series of events, a lightning strike, a sinkhole, and a soccer problem, sends Paul to Tangerine Middle School, which shows Paul the huge chasm between the clean artificiality of his home in Lake Windsor and the lower classes of the original community around which developments have grown. He starts out the school year with the mark of a disability in his folder, which entitles him to special treatment, but he soon proves himself better than his 20/20-sighted peers as a soccer goalie.

Paul is hampered by damaged eyes, apocryphally attributed to looking directly at an eclipse of the sun, but he sees more than anyone believes. The families are perfect, the houses are perfect, the school is perfect, everything is bright and cheery, although it rests upon swamp that's been burning for years, re-ignited by the frequent lightning strikes from the daily thunderstorms. Lake Windsor Downs is a representative modern development, a series of cookie-cutter houses on curvy streets, abruptly bordering the swampland that it overlays like a toy town rolled out on a sheet of Astroturf. Paul Fisher's family starts the book in transit, moving from Houston to a development in Tangerine County, Florida. It sounds closer in style to a Goosebumps title than your average young-adult fiction, but it's far better than that.Īt the core of this story is a common trope: kid moves to a new city, full of the unfamiliar and populated by kinds of people he's never met before. When I first bought Edward Bloor's Tangerine, the flap summary, the various covers, and the information online all led me to believe the book had a supernatural component: the blind can see, predictable lightning that does strike twice, geeks are cool - up is down, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria - and cryptic hints of an evil older brother.

Tangerine novel edward bloor