53 pages • 1 hour read
Edward BloorTangerine
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Coming of Age as Development from Prey to Predator
The predatory nature of secondary schoolers is infamous and one of the inconvenient facts of growing up. Well-meaning adults forget this at their peril—or, more specifically, at the peril of the youth they oversee. Edward Bloor reminds his readers of the fears and challenges that can consume young people as they struggle to discover themselves and develop their own moral code in the larger world. The relationship between predator and prey is one predicated on fear, and the central challenge of Paul’s burgeoning maturity—his coming-of-age journey—depends upon his ability to overcome his fears. Strikingly, Paul employs the imagery of predator and prey throughout the book, from his encounters with Erik to his understanding of the natural world to his experience with his Tangerine War Eagles soccer team.
The War Eagles are notable for their ferocity, from their name to their style of play. The other teams from the surrounding suburbs have mascots like the Seagulls (Lake Windsor) and the Whippoorwills (Palmetto), decidedly less ferocious and intimidating avian avatars. The War Eagles’ uniform “shows a ferocious-looking eagle with arrows in its talons” (110). They are not only associated with birds of prey, but also with weapons of war. Their militaristic chants serve to highlight this connection: “‘War! War! War!’ We all started screaming with him [Victor], blocking out the catcalls from the Whippoorwills and their fans. ‘War! War! War!’—in a frenzy that drove away all the fear and intimidation that I felt from our opening lap” (115).
Not only do the war chants serve as a tool of intimidation (or to alleviate it), but they also serve to cement the fellowship between the players. It is also significant that the cathartic chants alleviate the War Eagles’ own fears while simultaneously instilling fear in the opposing teams: “The War Eagles have set out on a bloody rampage through the county. We have destroyed every enemy. […] There is fear in their eyes when we come charging off our bus, whooping our war cry” (165). Paul symbolically becomes an apex predator, which eventually gives him the confidence to overcome his deepest fears.
Paul is also keenly observant of the natural relationship between predators and prey. He is the only one to speculate—correctly, in all likelihood—that the ospreys, another bird of prey, are swooping in to take the decorative koi from Lake Windsor’s faux lake: “They swoop down, snatch up the koi, and fly back to their nests. No one sees them; no one thinks about them; no one suspects them” (235). Paul’s observation highlights yet again the counterfeit nature of suburban Lake Windsor. The koi do not belong there, and they become easy pickings for the natural predators of the area. This resonates with the Fisher family’s dilemma, as well: They—along with the other residents of the sub-divisions—do not naturally belong in Tangerine, either; overdevelopment and crowding out the groves in favor of the privileged occupants who rarely understand their environs has made their lives there possible. It also points to Erik’s role as a predator. He, too, is not suspected of the predatory behavior in which he participates, swooping in to steal valuables from the unoccupied houses undergoing fumigation.
Indeed, Erik is the most prominent predator of all, especially in Paul’s life. The first time Paul describes Erik, it is in a memory of being chased by a car: “I heard the roar of the car closing in on me, louder and louder, like it had smelled its prey” (3). Erik is in the car with a baseball bat, smashing mailboxes and threatening Paul. Later, when Erik is in Arthur’s car, Paul hears that roar again: “I could hear a sound, a predator’s sound. […] It was the sound of Arthur and Erik accelerating, braking, and sliding through the mud on the perimeter road” (109). Another early memory of Erik has Paul feeling “the hot breath of a predator on my neck” (163). This is Paul’s challenge: To become fearless like Luis Cruz and to transform into a War Eagle. He must confront his bullying brother—and the family secret—to shed the fear that keeps him behaving like prey.
New Beginnings: The Healing of the Golden Dawn
The fractured Fisher family needs a new start. As they leave their home in Houston, heading for Tangerine County, Florida, Paul appears ready—even eager—to leave his experiences in that house behind. The focus on garbage is telling: “Now only this ten-gallon, self-tying, lemon-scented garbage bag remained, and we planned to toss it into the Dumpster behind the 7-Eleven” (1). Symbolically throwing away his past life, Paul moves tentatively into the future, worrying about the “zombie” that might be stalking them—an apt metaphor for an undying memory (1, 4). However, his arrival in Lake Windsor is dissatisfying, with its fake suburban strivings. It isn’t until he finds his place in Tangerine that Paul embarks upon a new journey toward a bare honesty and a clearly delineated identity.
Not only does Paul find his place with the War Eagles soccer team, but he also finds comfort, fascination, and a sense of purpose in the Cruz family’s tangerine groves. From his very first visit, he finds something authentic and satisfying about the work there, and he feels drawn to Luis’s commitment and authority. When Paul replies to Tino’s question about why he likes the groves so much, he responds, “[t]he way it smells. I like the way it smells out here” (167). Luis agrees wholeheartedly, and as he puts it, when he smells the citrus groves, “[i]t’s the scent of a golden dawn” (168). Indeed, this is the moniker he gives to his experimental tangerine trees: Golden Dawn. Scent is a powerful marker of memory, and here—instead of embodying undying fears, as in the zombie metaphor—the tangerine trees mark a positive new memory that Paul is making.
When Luis tragically dies, Paul pays tribute to him in a remarkable manner, as he strips away the sod in his yard to get to the soil underneath: “This was the dirt that we lived on. The dirt of the tangerine grove that we burned, and buried, and plowed under, and coated with sand, and landscaped over. Here it was” (244). Paul digs for the truth and for a sense of authenticity. He wants to remove the false veneer of the suburban development to reach what is more genuine underneath, just as Luis’s love for the tangerine groves is genuine and pure. Paul remembers Luis, and he “wept, and sobbed, and poured tears into that hole in the ground. Like an idiot? No, I don’t think so” (244). He waters the ground with his own sorrow, nurturing the soil and discovering what was genuine about himself: “I feel like Luis is a part of me now. I feel like a different person” (245).
This act, among others in Tangerine, gives Paul the courage to confront the truth about what happened to him—the horrific incident with the spray paint that led to his loss of vision—and how his family covered it up. No longer will the truth be hidden, like artificial sod over fertile ground. It is Luis’s influence that gives Paul the courage to turn Erik in for his part in Luis’s death: “I stood up straight and faced them all, like I had seen Luis do. ‘I saw—I heard Erik Fisher tell him [Arthur] to do it’” (276)
The novel ends as Dad, too, has a kind of awakening: He will become invested in Paul, not just the dream that was Erik; his first act is to drive Paul to yet another new school and yet another new start. As he and Paul drive through the tangerine groves, the car filled with “the scent of a golden dawn” (294), signifying that there are new beginnings in store for the Fisher family.
Belonging as Differently Abled; Socioeconomic and Racial Divides
The novel is suffused with difficult examinations regarding class and race, which lead to questions regarding belonging, access, and privilege. While the author grapples with issues of race obliquely—besides Joey’s racist outburst, the issue of racial bias in other characters is mostly left for the reader to determine—he does directly grapple with the notion of class privilege and class difference throughout the book.
Antoine Thomas plays football at Lake Windsor, blurring the boundaries of eligibility because the school attracts college football scouts. Tangerine High does not have the facilities, the equipment, or the prestige to bring notable scouts to its campus. In this example, race is incidental to class: The Tangerine school district, as Paul describes it, is impoverished first, and ethnically diverse second. Paul emphasizes the “cafetorium,” where the cafeteria doubles as the auditorium; the age of the building with its disinfectant smell; and the poor quality of the textbooks. He brushes aside the issue of race with a simple calculus: “I have no problem with that. I’ve always felt like a minority because of my eyes” (99). While these things are not really equivalent, Paul’s feelings reveal that the author’s intentions reside in excavating class privilege over examining the more vexed issues of racial disparity. Written in the late 1990s, Tangerine possesses the sensibility of a less race-conscious moment than in the current era.
Regarding class, the author takes pains to point out that the suburban life that Paul and his family lead is wealthier, more entitled, and less authentic. The community is walled off, quite literally. This begs the question of whether the wall keeps the suburban dwellers in—after all, the main villain of the book is the privileged and athletically talented Erik—or keeps the others, mostly working-class farmers, out. Either way, it serves definitively to keep the classes separated and forever alienated from each other.
While the book’s blind spots regarding race may be troubling—the comparison of the noise in Tangerine Middle’s “cafetorium” to a scene “in some old prison movie” especially grates (97)—it does try to scrutinize socioeconomic privilege in meaningful ways. Paul is gradually made aware of this privilege, from wincing at his Mom’s well-meaning but misguided attempts to shine a spotlight on the female soccer players at Tangerine to seeing his own neighborhood through the “hostile eyes” of the War Eagles (183). By the conclusion of the book, Paul feels more at home with his Tangerine teammates, intending to return at the start of the next school year. Tino’s bestowing on him the honorific “brother” cements his place among the less privileged, however ephemeral—or believable—that belonging might be.
