Tangerine
Edward Bloor (1997)
“A legally blind boy slowly recovers the memory his family buried — that his brother is the one who blinded him.”
Tangerine— Historical Context & Author Background
Author: Edward Bloor · Published 1997· Era: Contemporary / Young Adult·294 pages
Themes explored: truth, family-secrets, disability, class, environment, sports, identity, sibling-abuse
About Edward Bloor
Edward Bloor (born 1950) spent over two decades as a public school teacher and editor in Florida before publishing Tangerine in 1997. His years in Florida's educational system gave him direct knowledge of the state's school cultures, the IEP process, the tensions between suburban development and agricultural communities, and the weather patterns — lightning, sinkholes, freezes — that structure the novel's physical world. Bloor has described the novel as emerging from his observation of how families organize themselves around their most destructive members, and how institutions designed to help children often become mechanisms of exclusion.
Life → Text Connections
How Edward Bloor's real experiences shaped specific elements of Tangerine.
Bloor taught in Florida public schools and observed the IEP system firsthand
Paul's removal from soccer via his IEP — the accommodation system used as a tool of exclusion
Bloor's professional experience informs the novel's critique of institutional disability management. He knows how protection becomes limitation.
Bloor lived in Florida during a period of massive suburban development over former citrus land
Lake Windsor Downs built on bulldozed tangerine groves, the sinkhole caused by unstable fill
The environmental destruction in the novel is not metaphorical scenery — it's drawn from the real transformation of central Florida's landscape.
Bloor worked as an editor at Harcourt Brace, a major educational publisher
The novel's careful attention to school systems, bureaucratic language, and institutional failure
Bloor understood educational institutions from the inside — both their intentions and their structural limitations.
Bloor has spoken about watching families enable destructive children at the expense of their siblings
The Fisher family's entire organization around Erik's football career and concealment of his violence
The family dynamic is drawn from observed patterns, not abstraction. The specificity of the Fishers' dysfunction reflects real family systems Bloor witnessed.
Historical Era
1990s Florida — suburban sprawl, environmental destruction, multicultural tension
How the Era Shapes the Book
The novel is set during Florida's most aggressive period of suburban development, when planned communities were built over citrus groves and wetlands with minimal environmental review. The sinkholes, the lightning, and the freezes are all real features of central Florida's landscape that developers minimized and homeowners ignored. The demographic tension between established Latino agricultural communities and incoming white suburban families reflects real patterns in Tangerine County (a fictionalized version of areas like Polk or Orange County). The IEP system that constrains Paul reflects 1990s disability law that, while well-intentioned, was often administered by schools more concerned with liability than with student welfare.
Why Tangerine Matters Historically
Tangerine became one of the most widely assigned middle-school novels of the late 1990s and 2000s, praised for its unflinching treatment of sibling abuse, parental complicity, and disability — subjects that young adult literature had largely avoided or sentimentalized. The novel demonstrated that YA fiction could address family violence, environmental destruction, and institutional racism with the complexity of literary fiction while remaining accessible to twelve-year-olds.
- One of the first widely-read YA novels to portray sibling abuse as systematic rather than incidental — Erik is not a bully who occasionally goes too far but a sociopath enabled by every adult in his life
- Pioneered the use of journal format in YA fiction as a narrative device for a character reclaiming his own story from family mythology
- One of the first YA novels to link environmental destruction (Florida development) to personal and social dysfunction — the sinkhole as both literal and metaphorical collapse
Occasionally challenged for violence (Arthur's attack on Luis, the spray-paint incident) and for its unflattering portrayal of suburban family life. Some challenges have come from parents uncomfortable with the novel's depiction of parental complicity in child abuse — which rather proves the novel's point about the cost of not seeing.