It's a fairly uplifting idea with one small problem: it completely gets wrong the way soccer leagues are scored. Artistic License – Sports: One of the book's climactic moments features Paul needing to stop a last-second penalty kick so that his team will tie their rival and his former team, winning the league in the process.And There Was Much Rejoicing: Erik and Arthur react this way to Mike Costello's death, laughing and making jokes about it (i.e., they call him 'Mohawk Man' due to half his hair being singed off when the bolt struck him).Ambiguous Situation: Paul himself doesn't know if Erik brings out the worst in his friends, making their heinous actions more Toxic Friend Influence, or if Erik is good at finding people who complement his sociopathic tendencies.Erik is believed to be one by his and Paul's parents, and Antoine Thomas, the quarterback on Erik's football team, is one as well. The Ace: Luis Cruz the best tangerine farmer in Tangerine County.Can Paul deal with his football-hero brother, excel at soccer, and learn the truth about his past? And if that wasn't enough, his family's move to Tangerine County, Florida, isn't going well, what with wild weather out the wazoo, such as sinkholes enveloping schools, and lightning striking the same place every single day. He's struggling to remember a moment from his past, related to his eyesight and his asshole brother Erik, that he can't dig up no matter how hard he tries. The official story is that he stared too long at a solar eclipse, but Paul knows better than that. The novel's protagonist, Paul Fisher, wears coke-bottle glasses due to an incident in his youth. His first published novel it won several awards and has become a widely used book for assigned reading in schools. (Apr.Tangerine is a 1997 young adult novel by Edward Bloor. Problems crop up, too, in this book's pacing, but first-novelist Bloor pulls it off, wedding athletic heroics to American gothic with a fluid touch and flair for dialogue. A swarm of mosquitoes hovers over the housing development.

The horrific elements, however, remain largely unresolved. The playing fields are symbolic arenas in which Paul's anger at his brother and his tentative friendships with a group of poor minority kids get worked out. The element of suburban ecological horror here is both frightening and surreal, but it gives way in the second half of the novel to an onslaught of soccer and football games. As buried memories surface, he uncovers the ugly truth of what his football hero brother did to him years ago. When his family moves to Florida's Tangerine County, where lightning strikes every day and toxic smoke billows through the air, Paul begins to remember something else. When he was little, Paul stared at an eclipse too long.

Tangerine novel edward bloor