Tangerine: Full Book Analysis

Tangerine opens with Paul Fisher, a seventh grader from Houston, Texas, moving to Florida with his family after his father gets a job in Tangerine County, Florida. Tangerine is a far cry from Houston. While the development community Paul moves to is like his Houston home as both were new developments built on newly cleared land for profit, Tangerine’s extreme weather and stark cross-section of social classes are new to the Fisher family. The Fishers find themselves straddling middle-class life in Lake Windsor and the working-class life of the citrus farm laborers of Tangerine County.

As soon as they move to their new development community, Lake Windsor Downs, the problems begin. Muck fires constantly burn around the development, presenting a near-constant liability to the homes, and the community is plagued with termites, mosquitoes, and, later, robberies. Even though the community looks glamorous on the outside, with prominently designed houses that are meticulously painted and named after British royal families, underneath the ground, literally, are rotting tangerine trees and smoldering fires. The development, much like the lives of the Fishers, is built on precarious ground. The fires symbolize the problems simmering underneath the Fishers and the community at large. The neighborhood’s physical reality, where the surface appears neat and tidy but rot teems just beneath the surface, is true also for the residents in Lake Windsor, as many hold racist and classist views toward those working in Tangerine County.

Paul is partially blind from an accident as a child, an accident he cannot fully recall. His family has told him that he was blinded from looking at a solar eclipse for too long. Something about this explanation doesn’t feel right, but Paul knows one thing: His older brother Erik was involved. For most of the novel, Erik and his football career are the primary focus of the family. Mr. Fisher is riding all his own dashed hopes of playing college football on Erik. Mrs. Fisher spends a lot of time with Paul, bringing him on errands and talking to him, but her concern is mostly skin-deep, and she misses a lot of cues from Paul. She’s more focused on making sure the family remains in good standing in the community and that the family’s practical needs are met first. As neither parent seems involved in Paul’s life, Paul is left with plenty of time on his own, which he uses to observe life around him. His journal makes up the structure of novel, and with each entry, readers get an honest presentation of a boy’s observations into the characters and motivations of the people around him. Ironically, Paul becomes the only one who truly “sees” what’s going on in the community.

When Paul is kicked off the soccer team at his new school as an insurance risk, his dreams of “fitting in” with his new community appear dashed. Weather, which plays a significant role in the novel, fatefully intervenes when a sinkhole opens at the school and causes Paul to relocate to Tangerine Middle School, where he can start afresh. The lightning strikes, daily storms, muck fires, and sinkholes serve to reveal the characters’ and the town’s true values and motivations. The muck fires reveal the developers’ denial of paving over the tangerine farmers’ lives. The daily lightning strikes, which kill a football player, help reveal the callous nature of the school and residents. The sinkhole, a result of regularly occurring heavy rains, gives Paul a new lease on life and a new hope.

Tensions begin to simmer, however, when Paul arrives at his new school, Tangerine Middle School, and he gets a window into the working-class life of local citrus farmers, especially that of the Cruz family, a Hispanic family that owns a fruit plantation. For Paul, this new experience is a boon, for he gets to experience closer-knit family connections that his family and community members back in Lake Windsor lack. He’s also embraced into his new soccer team as a “brother” and gets a taste of what it’s like to belong to a real community, a community of people who work together for the benefit of all, not just a few. However, these new opportunities also serve to alienate Paul from his own family, causing him to see how little connection his family has with each other in comparison, and the more individualistic and self-preserving attitudes of his community members back in Lake Windsor. For Paul, these realizations challenge his faith in his own family, and begin to trigger his own hidden memories. Like the land he’s living on at Lake Windsor Downs, the ground beneath him begins to crack.

Tensions finally reach a pitch when Paul’s brother Erik insults and hits one of Paul’s new friends, Tino Cruz, in the Fishers’ backyard. Erik makes a joke about Tino being a “farm worker,” and when Tino defends himself, Erik strikes him. When Tino’s other brother, Luis, comes to avenge Tino, Erik’s right-hand man Arthur strikes Luis, causing an aneurysm that kills him a week later. When Tino comes to avenge Luis’s death at the Senior Awards Ceremony at Lake Windsor later in the novel, Paul is forced to make a choice between family loyalty and doing what he thinks is right. Paul finds a newfound sense of courage, something he’s been struggling with throughout the novel, when he joins the attack on Erik, allowing Tino to escape.

It is Antoine Thomas, a football player on Erik’s Lake Windsor Seagulls football team, who provides the final impetus for Paul to finally break free from his fear and his family’s lies. Antoine, the real star of the football team, pressured by the feeling of guilt for lying about his true address to play on the Seagulls and for witnessing Arthur’s attack on Luis, finally comes clean. He encourages Paul to come clean too, telling him the “truth will set [him] free.” Paul, who has harbored a lifelong fear of Erik, finally stands up to him, and it is in this moment that Paul’s memories return and he learns it was Erik and his friend Castor who blinded him as a young boy. Paul confronts his parents about their lies and deceit. He files a witness statement to the police, implicating Erik in the attack on Luis. Paul finally finds the courage, and with it the power, to set himself free.

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