- Title: Tangerine
- Author: Christine Mangan
- Publisher: Abacus- Little, Brown
- Star Rating: ★★★★
Described as “The Girl on the Train meets The Talented Mr Ripley under the Moroccan sun”, I was instantly drawn in. The front cover only added to its appeal, with a black and white 1950s model shielding her eyes from the sun, against a ‘tangerine’ orange background.
The story transports us to Tangier in Morocco in the 1950s, a mysterious place with many names: Tangier, Tanger, Tanjah, even the ancient city of Tingis. Here we meet the nervous and unsettled Alice Shipley, a woman struggling to adjust in a hot city bustling with life. Although she is married to John McAllister; a wealthy, loud, gregarious man with questionable morals, she spends most of her time alone inside their apartment, too afraid to venture outdoors.
When her old best friend from Bennington College, Lucy Mason, arrives at her apartment unexpectedly and uninvited, Alice is deeply troubled as they haven’t spoken in over a year- not since something happened between them. But Lucy, described as an ‘out of the kitchen woman’, desperately wants to make things right, and is determined to show Alice the real Tangier.
I devoured this book. It’s gothic, disturbing, and darkly gripping. With my favourite authors being Daphne Du Maurier, the Brontë’s, and F Scott Fitzgerald, Tangerine is exactly my kind of novel. The elements of Gothic fiction present within the story reawakened the Gothic literature student within me from University, and I delighted at Lucy’s mention of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Alice is portrayed as pale, ladylike and with a fragile demeanor, a common theme found in most Gothic novels, as it is intended to create the image of a female corpse.
It felt as though Alice was almost haunted by Lucy- and this is where I drew parallels to Rebecca (Du Maurier), as both novels use the idea of a powerful, masculine woman (at a time where women were expected to be fragile and repressed), to outweigh and eventually destroy another female character. I also loved the flashbacks to their time spent together at Bennington, as the dark twist is gradually unveiled and seeps its way into the present time.
Although Alice’s weak character could at times be frustrating, there are reasons why she almost needed to be this way. The frustration caused by this could be because you, as the reader, find yourself rooting for her. You don’t want her to be defeated, because the heroine is never defeated in the end, right? Or, at least, they are rescued by a male character. I loved it! I can’t wait to read more from this author…
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