![]() I found the beginning hard to get through but then with a little patience realised that the melodrama was a product of a mixture of genre themes and methods, and provided a suitable set of tools for the ideas being explored. The author of ‘Tangerine’ wrote a thesis on Gothic novels at university and this is her first novel. The novel ruthlessly exploits genre tropes borrowed from chick lit and also from Gothic fiction. Lucy ruthlessly gaslights Alice and eventually escapes the country, having agreed with Maud to help look after Alice in a mental institution in Spain. Lucy finds out John is sleeping with another woman and tries to get Alice to separate from her husband by telling her, but when Alice refuses to budge Lucy contrives to kill John with a rock, then manages to convince Alice’s aunt Maud that Alice is mentally unstable. John has some sort of official position and he’s probably a spy. The year is 1956, the year of Morocco’s independence. Tom is killed and Alice is injured.Īlice recovers her health and marries a man named John and they move to Tangier, where most of the novel takes place. The two become good friends but when Alice develops a relationship with a young man named Tom who attends a nearby educational institution, Lucy contrives to sabotage Tom’s car. ![]() Lucy and Alice were roommates at a college in Vermont Lucy having gained a scholarship and the privileged Alice having been sent over from England, where she grew up, to be educated. The story involves two young women, the literary Lucy and the fey Alice (who reminded me, for some reason, of Joan Didion, with her frail emotional equilibrium and her reliance on having a man in her life to ensure her happiness). I will include spoilers in what follows, so if you don’t want to know how the book turns out, stop reading here. This psychological thriller went well until about the 75-percent mark then it suddenly fell apart, the reader’s credulity stretched to a thinness that was quite unable to support the burden of the narrative tricks introduced to achieve the ending the author had picked out for herself. ![]()
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