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Erik In Tangerine By Edward Bloor

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The book Tangerine by Edward Bloor, is about a soccer player named Paul who moves Florida, where he attends new schools and meets new people. Throughout the book, the choices that Erik made had a traumatic effect on his younger brother, Paul. Erik is a champion placekicker for Lake Windsor High School. He uses hurting others as his own amusement, whether it’s verbally or physically. He doesn’t do all of work on his own though. Most of his dirty work was done by his sidekicks, Vincent Castor then later Arthur Bauer. Shmoop.com would describe Erik as, “an example of what happens when parents don't teach their kids right from wrong.” All in all, Erik is not one of the “good guys” in Tangerine and his actions always end up affecting someone else, …show more content…

Paul ran into the house crying, yelling, “it was “Erik”. I was saying “Erik.” (pg. 3) Paul goes on to say that Erik tried to kill him when his parents go to point towards the dining room to see Erik sitting at the table doing his homework. Then Erik has the nerve to say, “There he goes. Blaming me again.” Even though Erik knows that he purposely tried to run his brother over, he continually decided denied it. The book doesn’t specify completely why he did it, djksjksjk but throughout the book he tries to put fear in his brother so that may have been what he was trying to do. Get his Paul to fear him and he succeeded just that. After that Paul had complete fear in his brother, that his brother can do whatever he wants and no one would pay much attention to it. As well as, when Paul was only 5 years old, Castor, a friend of Erik’s sprayed white paint in his eyes while Erik held them open. (pg. 263) On another note, the whole family knew about the incident and did nothing but lie to the poor Paul and say that “he stared at a solar eclipse.” (pg. …show more content…

It all started when TIno, Paul and a couple other guys from their science group comes over to Paul's house to work on their report, and when they finish, they head out to the backyard to kick the soccer ball around a little. Then Erik pulls up with Arthur and went up to them and said, “Look at this. I think it's great that these farm-labor kids get to spend a day away from the fields.” (pg. ?) Paul tries to get Tino back down but is unable to and makes fun of Erik for doing a front flip on tv (pg. ?) Erik then lashes out with anger and hits Tino in the face. Tino layed there, blood dripping from his head from Erik’s ring that had made a cut in his head. The next day, Luiz Cruz, Tino’s older brother showed up to confront Erik for hitting his little brother when Erik tell Arthur to hit Luis with the blackjack. The worst part of it all was that Luis ended up dying and Paul had witnessed a crime. This creates an another effect on Paul that gives him a motive to stand up to his brother because he hurt someone other than him, he told someone to hurt someone else’s loved one. Paul does in fact stand up to his brother showing no fear when he snitched on Erik to the police for having involvement with the murder of Luis. (pg.

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