Then the place fills up with large houses and with people whose only common bond is that they qualified for the same amount of mortgage money.' Upset by the changing landscape, Bloor asked himself: 'Who are the people who used to make a go of it here? Who are the people now making their exit while we're making our entrance? And how do they feel about all this?'īloor addresses such questions in his debut novel, 1997's Tangerine. A developer erects a wall, thinks of a theme, and gives the place a name. After that, a completely different place is created, a place as fictional as any novel. This is how it happens: The citrus trees are uprooted and bulldozed into piles the piles are set on fire the charred remains of the trees are buried, and tons of white sand are dumped over their graves. As he once recalled: 'To my dismay, I watched the daily destruction of the citrus groves along this route. He began his career in children's publishing in 1986, and came up with the idea for his first novel while commuting to work on Florida's back roads west of Orlando. In the meantime, Bloor graduated from college, then worked for three years as a teacher. I continued my soccer playing through high school, on a really good team, and into college, on a really bad team.' Bloor's memories of the game eventually found their way into his fiction. I was one of those little kids trying desperately to kick a soccer ball amidst the multilingual howling. Parents of the children on these teams raged and howled at the games as if their national pride was at stake. 'Different ethnic communities-Poles, Italians, Germans, Ukrainians-all had their kids' soccer clubs. So I decided to try it myself.'īorn in 1950, Bloor was raised in Trenton, New Jersey, and recalled that, during his childhood, soccer reigned supreme. As Bloor once told SATA: 'My teaching job led to a job in educational publishing, where I was actually required to sit and read young adult novels all day long.

Work in ProgressĪ former high school English teacher, Edward Bloor has managed to find time while working as a book editor at a major publishing house and helping to raise his two children to pen three well-received novels for teen readers: Crusader, Story Time, and the award-winning debut novel Tangerine. Tangerine was adapted as an audiobook, Recorded Books, 2001. Though it is almost 400 pages long, the nonstop action and many startling revelations will keep teens transfixed until the very last sentence.Tangerine, Harcourt Brace (San Diego, CA), 1997.Ĭrusader, Harcourt Brace (San Diego, CA), 1999. Bloor's brooding, densely plotted page turner is an incredibly original novel that will engage teens on several levels. Roberta's quest to find her mother's killer weaves together several skillfully constructed subplots, including a shady political scheme to ruin the mall, real and imagined hate crimes against an Arab store owner, and how the Crusader itself, a virtual reality game, serves as the catalyst that ignites and unites these seemingly unrelated factors in Roberta's life. She keeps her mind off the fact that the arcade is slowly going under and that her father ignores her existence, but she cannot ignore the fact of her mother's brutal murder seven years ago. His follow-up, Crusader, delves even deeper into the dark side of suburbia, exposing racism, virtual violence, and even murder behind the sunny facade of a Florida strip mall.įifteen-year-old Roberta works hard every afternoon and weekend in the family business, a virtual reality arcade in the West End Mall.

A steamy, swampy Florida setting and the threat of a repressed memory are two of the elements in Edward Bloor's first young adult novel, Tangerine, that made it an instant suburban gothic classic.

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