Tangerine

A book about football and soccer. Not really my cup of tea. Or so I thought. It's slightly complicated to explain how I ended up reading Tangerine, but basically it's for a paper I'm writing. And I absolutely loved it! It's likable on many levels, but my favorite aspect of it-and why I ended up reading it for school-is its complete criticism of upper middle class America. The family moves to a new housing develoment in Florida but because of neglagence and disregard for the environment all sorts of things start to go wrong. Insects attack, buildings get sucked into sink holes, people are injured and killed. It's some dark stuff for a children's book. The book's indictment doesn't stop there. It also takes on the ugly side of some of the "virtues" that middle class America touts: the value of the individual over the group, the use of so-called reason to skirt justice, doing whatever it takes to get ahead-even if it means using deception and disregarding the rules. Overall, the characters were believable in that they all had faults and were all recognizable as people from the real world, without being stereotypes.

I've tried to explain to several people, without much success, what my paper is going to be about. I'll try again: most books that try to deal with the issue of race do it by dealing with characters that are not white. Having representation for all kinds of people in literature is certainly important, but the problem is, they don't deal with the underlying issue which is the standard by which we as a society judge all people: Whiteness. Whiteness does not neccessarily equal Caucasian, but instead all of the things that have been connected to the idea of White, such as wealth, athleticism, having the perfect nuclear family, masculinity, emotional strength, and so on. In many ways this book deconstructs the White ideal in a very bold way and is critical of it in a way I have never experienced in children's literature, or really any other literature for that matter!

Just so you know, I'm no brilliant thinker, these ideas about Whiteness, including the example of Tangerine, are discussed in a book called Looking Glasses and Neverlands, by Karen Coats. I just simplified them (and probably did not do Coats' ideas justice at all). My paper is going to compare Tangerine to The Secret Life of Bees in their treatment of Whiteness. I'm really excited to start! Sorry to be such a school loving geek. I'll try to make my next post on here about a book, movie, or musician that is completely mindlessly enjoyable. But as a last word, Tangerine is a highly enjoyable read and I would reccommend it to anyone who isn't too cool to read children's books.