Christine Mangan's first novel, Tangerine, offers suspense and lingering questions in a drama centered on the post-college relationship between two young women recently relocated to Morocco.
Lucy Mason and Alice Shipley were roommates at Bennington College in Vermont. They came from quite different circumstances: Alice was a well-off British orphan, whose guardian, Aunt Maude, is serious but somewhat unfeeling in her role. Lucy was a scholarship student, also an orphan, and this similarity is part of what led the pair to bond. They were terribly close in college--until the accident.
In alternating chapters, the reader encounters past and present through Lucy's and Alice's respective perspectives. An epilogue and prologue, with unnamed narrators, offer more mystery. The two women's accounts of past events differ only slightly, at first. But as the novel unfolds, it becomes complicated. Lucy's devotion is perhaps a bit too intense. Alice's agoraphobia is variously attributed to her parents' death, or to a more sinister cause. Eventually, their memories of their shared past diverge enough that the question can no longer be ignored. Is this gaslighting? Mental illness? Surreality? Are these the simple mistakes of memory or is there a more ominous force at work?
Tangerine is a novel of intrigue and shifting perspectives, starring two ultimately unreliable narrators. Its appeal lies in the lush, sensual setting; the metered release of information about the shadowy past; and especially in untangling the twisted mystery of the present. Suspense fans will be well satisfied. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia