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A review by faybe
Tangerine by Christine Mangan
2.0
Pretty meh overall. The characters weren't that well developed, and their inner thoughts got quite repetitive in the later stages of the book. The story dragged in places but did managed to keep me pulled along to the end.
I didn't really get a sense of the time and place. If I didn't know it was set in the 50s I'm not sure I could have picked that out.
The biggest issues for me only really came out at the end when it became clear that rather than plot devices or the result of unreliable narrators they were just not that well written. There wasn't much distinction between the two narrative voices, which I thought during the book was because they would turn out to be the same person.
The age thing bothered me, as they were 17 when they met, school for nearly 4 years, a year until Lucy arrived in tangier, and then Alice didn't turn 21 until the epilouge???
If Youssef had said he didn't recognise the real Alice and admitted putting Lucy in touch with someone who would get her new papers then that would have proved Alice right and probably got him off the hook too? Wouldn't the police have asked for a description, accent...?
What was the point of the man with the scar?
I didn't really get a sense of the time and place. If I didn't know it was set in the 50s I'm not sure I could have picked that out.
The biggest issues for me only really came out at the end when it became clear that rather than plot devices or the result of unreliable narrators they were just not that well written. There wasn't much distinction between the two narrative voices, which I thought during the book was because they would turn out to be the same person.
The age thing bothered me, as they were 17 when they met, school for nearly 4 years, a year until Lucy arrived in tangier, and then Alice didn't turn 21 until the epilouge???
If Youssef had said he didn't recognise the real Alice and admitted putting Lucy in touch with someone who would get her new papers then that would have proved Alice right and probably got him off the hook too? Wouldn't the police have asked for a description, accent...?
What was the point of the man with the scar?