This was a fantastic, suspenseful read. At times I was often unsure of what was being imagined versus what was really happening with Alice. I finished this book in two days and look forward to reading more by Christine Mangan.

Again, I'm counting this one for this year's total. I tried to get into this but just really couldn't.

Tangerine’s jacket blurb by Joyce Carol Oates, “As if Donna Tartt, Gillian Flynn, and Patricia Highsmith had collaborated on a screenplay to be filmed by Hitchcock” is spot on. I found it to be a mostly gripping page turner set with the unique backdrop of a 1950s Morocco recently freed from colonial oppression. Mangan releases a few secrets a little too early. In my opinion if she’d held back slightly it could have driven the suspense onward to the end. Overall Tangerine was an enjoyable book, especially to kick off fun summer reads for 2018.

Giving this book a generous 1 star because there were 4 good pages of content in chapter 17. I also enjoyed the acknowledgements where the author admits it was plucked out of the slush pile and rewritten several times, presumably to the point where the editor could no longer bear to see it and agreed to go to production even though the final draft should not have been deemed worthy of print.
Was it one of the worst books I’ve ever read? Hell, yes.
Why did I keep reading then? Well because of the lockdown and the global pandemic. What else did I have on?

This book is extremely clumsily executed. At first I thought, hang on I can’t tell these two practically identical mouse like girls apart. Why do they whisper so often and tremble all the time? Why must they both remind us ad nauseam that they met in school, in Bennington. Equally tiresome was the incessant foreshadowing ‘after what happened’. If you want to see dual point of view done properly where it’s not repetitive and it’s an actually good representation of unreliable narrators watch The Affair. If you like tiresome repetition in dialogue, prose and description and foreshadowing perhaps try those Mr Gray books, the s&m ones. Those books are also full of ‘heroines’ whose lips tremble all at costs and are untrue to life 2d characters. I’m not going to get into how obviously problematic it was that the hinted at lesbianism was perceived as an otherness, because that also went nowhere or that the smug, rude ex pat thing going on was really quite offensive too (all the locals were constantly referred to as mosquitoes). I’m outraged that this was compared to Elena Ferrante’s masterpiece about female friendship; this was not about female anything. There were also lots of timeline problems like where one minute she was trying to ring the husband and then would fall down a rabbit hole of thought and then be walking alongside him. Careless editing. There were also an unusually high number of people knocking into each other, maybe 6 or 7. Using it once to drag a plot along is forgiveable but 7 times? Come on lady, don’t abuse our eyes with this rubbish on the page.
Handled properly, the gaslighting and mental illness and mistaken identity might have made for an interesting enough story but this author was incapable of making this story grow legs. And mostly, it just wasn’t sexy. It should have been but it wasn’t.

The story of two young women, Alice and Lucy, best friends at Bennington, a Vermont college in the 50s whose friendship is tested when one, fragile Alice, meets a boy from a neighbouring college. Then ‘something’ happens and fast forward a year and Alice, now married to the vaguely mysterious government official, John, is in Tangier where Lucy finds her.

What should be a fascinating mystery, set in the oppressive heat of a city where tensions between the Moroccans and their colonial masters are at breaking point as independence approaches, descends into a muddled and highly derivative tale. The two narrators are both highly unreliable but repetitive and their voices are not sufficiently distinct. The dialogue is stilted; the supporting cast are mere ciphers with the one Moroccan, Youssef, coming dangerously close to being a caricature.

The denouement comes as a welcome but rather rushed surprise at the end of the meandering second half of the novel. In conclusion, a fascinating premise let down by weak characterisation and a plot that loses its tension midway through the book.

Mangan has an MFA in fiction writing. I think she should ask for her money back.

In every area -style, plot, characterisation - the novel is either weak or derivative (mainly of The Talented Mr Ripley)

Here’s an example from where a character encounters someone smoking a cigarette. ...and I watched, fascinated as plumes of smoke enveloped her, spreading throughout our room, as if hungry to mark the corners of it, to claim it.

And that type of over-writing can be found on practically every page.

I was not expecting such a plot twist towards the end, though it made me indulge the book. I absolutely loved the writing technique and just the plot overall. Yes, it took me quite a while to read, but every minute spent reading was spent well.