{"id":7764,"date":"2018-04-02T10:46:07","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T10:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7764"},"modified":"2018-04-18T11:19:54","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T11:19:54","slug":"tangerine-by-christine-mangan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7764","title":{"rendered":"Tangerine by Christine Mangan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Little, Brown UK\/Ecco US
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

March 2018
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Optioned for film by George Clooney\u2019s Smokehouse Pictures (with Scarlett Johansson to star), and reputedly bought for HarperCollins US at more than $1 million, this artful story of female gaslighting has a lot going for it.<\/p>\n

Set in 1950s Morocco, where women who have acclimatized are known as Tangierines, it presents two first-person narrative voices.\u00a0 One is introvert Alice Shipley, newly married and definitely not settled in Tangiers.\u00a0 The other is her erstwhile roommate from her college days in Vermont: the chillingly composed Lucy Mason.\u00a0 Something so sinister happened in Vermont that Alice had never expected to see Lucy again.<\/p>\n

The book opens in Spain, as an ill and unstable young woman recovering in a sanatorium remembers Tangiers.\u00a0 She remembers another unnamed woman; and she thinks she remembers the body of an unnamed man being dragged from the sea.<\/p>\n

What follows is a carefully plotted but somewhat mechanical semi-Gothic horror story about obsession, identity theft and cold-blooded manipulative revenge.<\/p>\n

Alice is a depressive recluse (not nearly so well observed as the central character in Hilary Mantel\u2019s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street<\/em>). \u00a0Her husband, John, appears to be cheating on her.\u00a0 When Lucy turns up out of the blue, and John goes missing, Alice has no choice but to question her own sanity.<\/p>\n

In many ways, it is a simple plot, aimed to chill.\u00a0 A vulnerable young woman is preyed upon by a controlling \u2018friend\u2019.\u00a0 If she protests (as when she catches said friend stealing from her), she is treated as if she has gone out of her mind.\u00a0 Quite what is in it for the villainess (who plans ahead, and takes on Alice\u2019s identity when it suits her) is never fully explored, not even when she ropes in an elderly aunt of Alice\u2019s to get Alice put away.\u00a0 Despite high praise in advance from Joyce Carol Oates, no less, this reader found the whole concoction too pat and almost entirely lacking in depth. \u00a0Even Tangiers felt like a place of pro-forma exoticism.<\/p>\n

As the basis for a screenplay, however, it probably can\u2019t fail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

The book opens in Spain, as an ill and unstable young woman recovering in a sanatorium remembers Tangiers. She remembers another unnamed woman; and she thinks she remembers the body of an unnamed man being dragged from the sea. What follows is a carefully plotted but somewhat mechanical semi-Gothic horror story about obsession, identity theft and cold-blooded manipulative revenge […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7764"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7842,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7764\/revisions\/7842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}