I am always looking for more sports books to connect with my students who are athletes.  I’ve found lots of books around basketball, baseball, and football, but not so many for soccer.  Tangerine (Scholastic 1997) by Edward Bloor will be one of those books that I put into the hands of my soccer players and many other readers.  Paul Fisher lives to play soccer, but Tangerine is about so much more:  disturbing family dynamics and  willfully blind adults.

Paul Fisher may be the only character wearing thick glasses, but he is the only member of his family to see things clearly in this new place they’ve moved.  On the surface, the town of Tangerine is filled with gleaming subdivisions and is bursting with opportunities.  As Paul struggles to fit into another new place, he discovers some very strange things going on.  Thunderstorms fill every afternoon, but not even a lightning strike that kills a student will cancel sports practices.  A muck fire constantly burns underground while mosquitoes fill the air above.  In between, termites are eating away at those new houses.  Inside his new house, Paul is terrorized by his older brother Erik, the football hero.  His parents are blind to the torment dished out by Erik and can only focus on the Erik Fisher Football Dream.

Paul tries not to let it get to him until he’s kicked off the middle school soccer team because of his disability.  (Did he really damage his eyes by staring at a solar eclipse?)  Then a sinkhole swallows most of Paul’s middle school.  The chaos afterwards opens up a new opportunity for soccer at a different school, Tangerine Middle School.  The students there are much rougher, but Paul earns the respect of the War Eagles on and off the field.   With their friendship, he gains the courage to see the truth about his community and to confront the dark secrets in his family’s past.  Ultimately, he decide if he has the courage to speak the truth to people who don’t want to hear it.