I’ve never started a review with the words Oh, my God, but they perfectly encapsulate Christine Mangan’s unbelievably tense, incredibly smart debut novel about identity, obsession and secrets ... Mangan full-speeds up to her shocking finale, twisting the plot with reveals you never see coming. Best of all, when the book — and the body count — are finished, it’s impossible not to keep thinking about these sharply drawn characters and imagining what might happen next.
...like a good tennis match, the salvos grow more intense. Lucy is a chameleon who makes Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley look talentless when it comes to reinvention. She’s a force to be reckoned with. Alice, it would seem on the surface, is going to be easy prey. But as emotionally frail as she is, she still rallies just enough to keep the match close and gives us hope for an upset ... Occasionally, the story’s momentum is slowed by Mangan’s enthusiastic attempts to turn the novel into a threesome, with Tangier as its third character ... Moreover, sometimes the two women sound so similar that they are difficult to distinguish ... Still, these are small distractions. The lying, the cunning, and the duplicity are so very mannered that it’s chilling. Rich in dread, the foreboding positively drips from every page of this one.
Tangerine works best when Mangan juggles the untrustworthiness of her two narrators, writing and then rewriting their history together ... For a novel that leans so heavily on its setting, Tangerine rarely succeeds at evoking more of Tangier than its heat, its humidity (or dust), its 'confined and chaotic streets,' and its sweet mint tea. This, the novel’s biggest weakness, is largely a failing of Mangan’s prose, which tends to be general rather than specific, lofty rather than grounded, received rather than observed ... Tangerine is undeniably hokey...But these clichés do not detract from the enjoyment the novel offers; they are, paradoxically, part of its charm. Tangerine is not a book about real people and how they feel or behave but a book about other books, and a few old movies, a concoction of familiar yet also reliably fun fictional gestures.
Tangerine’s strength is its propulsive, tightly drawn plot, especially toward the end, and exhibition of tried-and-true thriller themes. The central relationship between Alice and Lucy strongly recalls Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley in its frenetic pace, homoerotic implications, stark class divide, and mutual obsession ... Although actually, the book feels more like a screenplay for the movie version, a text in which each line advances the plot, selects a mood or a time of day, but appears far too untroubled by artistic intention, novelty, or intrigue ... The imperious conflation of personal drama with the coinciding fight for Moroccan independence is flat-out unbearable.
Tangerine is cinematically engineered, an aromatic stew of ingredients ripe for a big-screen treatment — exotic ’50s setting, unreliable narrators with inscrutable motivations, mysteries clouded in madness ... The plotting all but demands comparisons to Patricia Highsmith; the sweaty, paranoid atmosphere screams Hitchcock. This isn’t to say Tangerine is at the level of those masters. It’s deliberately evocative of them. And once that initial intrigue wears off, Mangan’s touch loses its luster rather quickly. Her style feels more imitative than original, a dispiriting reminder of what more daring storytellers could do here. The writing is laborious, particularly early on, and Mangan’s Hitchcock emulation turns problematic as confounding sexual politics increasingly drive the narrative. It becomes clear that there’s not enough of a story here: The twists are fun, but hardly jaw-dropping, and the descriptive redundancies feel like padding for a book thinner than its page count suggests.
It’s as if Mangan couldn’t decide whether to write a homage to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or a sun-drenched novel of dissolute Westerners abroad in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith and Paul Bowles, so she tried to do both. She mostly succeeds ... [Mangan] knows all the notes to hit to create lush, sinister atmosphere and to prolong suspense. Unfortunately, she hits them all, and she hits them a little too hard. Both narrators periodically lapse into the language of academia, bluntly signaling how we should interpret the narrative rather than letting us figure it out for ourselves ... At times, Tangerine reads as if it were reverse-engineered from a scholarly paper about suspense fiction. Happily, you can write a satisfying, juicy thriller this way, if not a blazingly original one.
In chapters told in Alice’s and Lucy’s alternating voices, we learn that the women had a falling out, and the traumatic facts slowly emerge ... Ms. Mangan makes good use of her arid locale—which is oppressive for Alice but inspiring to Lucy ... But caveat lector: Tangerine, like its namesake fruit, can be both bracing and bitter.
...this old-fashioned tale of obsession and sticky-hot shadows practically pulses on the page. The breathlessness of the prose — both Alice and Lucy’s narration has a lush, multicomma’d headiness to it — keeps those pages flipping, and you can easily picture the eerily elegant movie this might be ... I got quite happily lost under Tangerine’s spell, in Mangan’s mesmerizing triplets of description (whiskey smells like 'smoke and dust and something ancient'). It carries more than a whiff of melodrama, but how very intoxicating it smells.
Unfortunately, the author's attempts to fix Lucy as potentially criminal are less successful than her depiction of Lucy immersed in Moroccan culture ... I wondered how the book might read if Lucy were the sole narrator. That wondering is less a sign that it should have been written in that fashion than one I was not wholly engaged in the story. Alice's dithering annoyed me ... Classic writers of thick, Gothic suspense like Highsmith and Du Maurier knew how to match psychology and setting. Towards the end of Tangerine I hoped, for a moment, that Mangan would integrate Lucy's motives with her surroundings, that character and reader would both become lost in a chaotic bazaar filled with both possibility and purgatory. While that didn't happen, who knows what Christine Mangan will write next? Something, I hope, with a strong female protagonist and another fascinating location.
The echoes of Patricia Highsmith reverberate almost too loudly here. Yes, Mr. Ripley has become a femme fatale, but Mangan’s take on that familiar theme never seems reductive, nor mere homage. That’s partially because of the electrical energy that crackles between Alice and Lucy, but it’s also related to Mangan’s ability to turn the mood and the setting of the story into a kind of composite force field that sucks the reader in almost instantly.
The story is so formulaic and the prose so basic that it’s a wonder the book is as unputdownable as it is. Down-it-in-one beach reads such as this are fascinating things: predictable, insubstantial and full of cliché ... Tangerine is a vintage travel poster in literary form. Actually, it’s a screengrab of an Instagram post of a vintage travel poster: so filtered and cropped that its artificiality is a given, yet that doesn’t spoil the fun.
...the guessing game is on from the start ... While the sense of place in this novel is astonishing, the pacing of the narrative is extraordinary. The story feels like it should be languid but it’s captivating, swift and spooky.
To relate more of the plot would be to rob the novel of its many pleasurable twists and turns. Tangerine is likely to remind mystery buffs of the work of Donna Tartt, author of The Secret History, and of Patricia Highsmith, author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Mangan’s plotting has the crackling unpredictability of Ruth Rendell ... Tangerine is meant to be consumed at a rapid pace, so no time is left over to poke at the plausibility of its reversals ... Mangan plays with familiar tropes, but she deploys them with wit, insight and precision ... Tangerine is a welcome and refreshing burst of literary tartness, a deliciously juicy summer read.
...stylish and intense ... In her pages, Ms. Mangan renders a similar visual excitement and ominous tone that Hitchcock brought ... Beneath Ms. Mangan’s striking style is plenty of substance. She follows the obsessive friendship between Alice and Lucy with varied tempos in her writing, sometimes slow and introspective, other times speeding it up with the dramatic tension and twists of a good murder mystery. These changes of pace keep the reader off balance and wondering what’s going to happen next.
Where the writing gets a little thin, the story is carried along in the reader’s mind by other popular culture representations of Tangier and stories of lonely, vulnerable girls like the unnamed woman in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca or those in Sarah Water’s Fingersmith. Readers will no doubt enjoy the direct references and allusions to classic writers and books. If you’re in the mood for a novel that will keep you guessing, this is for you. There are a lot of layers to sift through, and when it's over, you'll want to sift through them all again.
Mangan combines these elements into a taut and heady suspense story ... There’s the evocative heat, beauty and menace of the 'strange, lawless city,' particularly in the restless final days under French rule ... Constraints on adult women in the 1950s add to the book’s tension.
Mangan plays up the tension with an expert touch ... This is a novel that drinks at the same bar as Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and there are echoes of that same dance of desire and possession here. But Alice and Lucy’s story is certainly a cocktail of its own — perhaps a dirty martini to Highsmith’s vodka tonic ... Alice and Lucy’s complicated relationship has shades of eroticism, covetousness, and understanding, and it takes the intimacy of being together in a foreign land to reveal their truth.
A novel should stir the emotions, and Tangerine, the debut novel from Christine Mangan, does just that. It made this reviewer boiling mad. And that’s a good thing ... Readers will hope that Mangan, like Highsmith, writes a series of books about this villain, if for no other reason than to see whether the lowlife gets his or her comeuppance or slips away one more time.
The plotting all but demands comparisons to Patricia Highsmith; the sweaty, paranoid atmosphere screams Hitchcock. This isn’t to say Tangerine is at the level of those masters. It’s deliberately evocative of them. And once that initial intrigue wears off, Mangan’s touch loses its luster rather quickly ... The writing is laborious, particularly early on, and Mangan’s Hitchcock emulation turns problematic as confounding sexual politics increasingly drive the narrative. It becomes clear that there’s not enough of a story here ... The book is undeniably readable, even at its clunkiest, and some of its scenes are vividly imagined.
Every so often, a debut crime novel comes along that is so technically sound and vividly imagined, you can hardly believe the author really has never published a book before. Tangerine is one such read ... In a story humming with interpersonal tension and simmering with the heat and haze of Morocco, Mangan weaves an outstanding and transportive thriller that will delight fans of Patricia Highsmith, Gillian Flynn, and Alfred Hitchcock; yes, really, this book is that good. Frankly, if Christine Mangan isn’t a rising literary star, I just don’t know who is.
A vivid setting and a devious, deadly plot, though the first is a bit overdone and the second contains a few head-scratchers, including the evil-lesbian trope.
Although some of the plot developments are easy to predict, the novel is narrated persuasively in alternating chapters by Alice and Lucy, and Mangan’s portrayal of Tangier is electric. This sharp novel reads like Single White Female rewritten as a collaboration between Paul Bowles and Mary McCarthy.
