Tangerine, by Edward Bloor
First off, it's a good thing I picked up this particular edition, with the kid in the glasses. I'd heard the book title floating around lately, and found it at my local used book store. I know you're not supposed to judge a book by it's cover, but I was looking forward to the read as soon as I picked up the kid in glasses. A nothing special, nothing cool, nothing remarkable kid in coke-bottle glasses with..wait.. is that lightening reflecting in the lenses? Cool...
Had I picked up this cover it would have been all over. Back on shelf. Not gonna happen.
Sorry. I'm not a soccer fan. I know every self-respecting human being is supposed to be drooling over the sport right now, with the World Cup just finishing, and I tried to care...really, I did...Tangerine is the story of Paul Fisher, a middle-school average futbol-loving kid with a super star big brother with a nasty (albeit mysterious) history and a football scholarship. Their family moves to a place called Tangerine, where citrus lives and breathes in the community as much as muck fires (???) and lightening storms that strike the same place...um dozens of times (double ???). Of course, nothing is quite as it seems and you never get the whole story until the end, which is what I guess makes a good story.
I have a one serious issue with this book, as a writer. Who is the audience?
Kids read up a bit, so a story about a middle grader would be generally geared towards an early middle grader. However, the story involves a kid being beaten to death, another kid being struck by lightening and dying in the middle of football practice, and a big brother spray painting his little brother's eyes open while mom pretends it never happened. Not what I would generally call early middle grade content, even for the more mature ones.
The book is written as a journal, which I love as a reader, because you really get to get inside the protagonist's head and you don't know anything until they know it. It makes identifying with the main character either easier or more difficult, depending on how the author handles the internal dialogue. Paul (the MC) is a sophisticated kid who is dang smart, good enough at soccer to get onto the team of much older and bigger kids on his first try, and gets in with the super cool kids on pretty much his first day at school. The only difficulties this kid faces are his glasses (from an unknown source, as he obviously didn't get them from staring into an eclipse, as we are told) and parents who would rather watch high school varsity football than middle school soccer. So, as an adult I was able to connect with his wit and humor (which flowed abundantly, thank you Mr. Bloor), but I wasn't sure how kids would feel about this too-good-to-be-true kid.
So I went to the rating charts on Amazon...I know, I totally cheated.
Surprisingly (or maybe it shouldn't have been) kids either loved or HATED it, and teachers, parents, and writers loved it. Why? Probably because it was beautifully written, with wit and humor, expertly crafted scenes, and secondary characters that jumped off the page. But it was hard to connect with Paul for the kids who were 'forced' to read it for class or read it because they thought it would be about soccer, thanks to the cover art.
So, Amazon verified my suspicions about my first critical review. Though, in the future, I will never critique with "I hated it" or "it sucked" without solid, founded reasons. "This book should eat pig poop" doesn't help me decide if I should read it or not.
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