Reviewed by Catherine Parnell
Tangerinn
By Emanuela Anechoum
Translated from the Italian by Lucy Rand
Europa Editions
January 2026, ISBN: 9798889661603, Paperback, 256 pages
A parent’s death triggers a cascade of grief – this much is obvious. Less clear is what will arise from the loss. When Mina, the narrator in the novel Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum, translated from the Italian by Lucy Rand, gets the news of her Moroccan-born father’s death, her carefully carved life in London stalls. She returns to her childhood home in Italy to mourn, acknowledging “the person I had become was irrelevant here.” With parental death, a mutation has occurred, and a psychogeographic search begins as Mina evaluates the nature of her legacy. In the face of sorrow, she weaves together her ancestry, a psychic exercise in what did I miss and what does it mean. Even in the least complicated relationship, myriad circumstances and emotions surface, and in Mina’s case, migration, ethnicity, guilt, alienation, and acceptance struggle for airtime, all in an attempt to restructure identity.
This effort is at the heart of Tangerinn. Mina’s the daughter of a Moroccan immigrant and an Italian woman and is herself on the run from her small-town childhood home in Calabria. At the time of her father’s death, she’s living in London with a “digital activist,” white and privileged Liz, so politically correct and addicted to Instagram that you will wish you peed in her conditioner, as Mina did, “to rebalance the invisible weights that held me beneath her.” Mina’s hardly pleasant, yet she possesses an acute sense of awareness that allows readers to look past her crusty thoughts and actions because she touches something in all of us – that stab we feel when we confront unpleasant truths about ourselves and the pain we feel when we’ve been negligent in our relationships with others.
The death of Mina’s father sets the novel in motion, Mina returns to Italy, and in her grief, jogs back and forth in time, uncovering her father’s history, his flight from Morocco, his marriage to Berta, her Italian mother, and what led him to establish his bar on the Calabrian coast, the Tangerinn – a place for migrants and the displaced to gather. Migration is the foundation of this novel, especially the parallels between Omar’s flight from Morocco, and Mina’s flight from Italy. The Tangerinn, once Mina’s favored place —now run by Aisha, her sister – exposes and flames Mina’s tension between belonging and alienation. Mina’s sister belongs, somewhat. Mina does not, but only because, as Aisha points out, she will not expose her vulnerability, her insecurity. “This character you enjoy playing, she [Aisha] said, slowly. Isn’t it tiring?” The sisters bathe in the “silence of resentment” until unyielding emotional truth liberates them.
The chapters about Omar’s life and flight from Morocco are chronicled by Mina and addressed to him. It may take readers a moment to adjust to that narrative form, but the immediacy it provides is worth it. It’s a history and a conversation, the kind where you leave what was behind and move into the present state of what is. Interior reckoning goes a long way and is itself a form of migration, maybe even another form of death in the father’s and daughter’s struggle to align identity with a self in a foreign land. Cultural and geopolitical realities surface, yet within the walls of the Tangerinn bar, Mina, Aisha, and the displaced gather, seeking home in a conditional future, walking the line between “strategy and luck.” But it’s in revisiting a memory of her father that Mina finally understands, “You had to win. You had to win, even against yourself.”
About the reviewer: Catherine Parnell is a writer, editor, educator, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. She is co-founder of MicroLit and serves on the board of Wrath-Bearing Tree. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in Reckon Review, Compulsive Reader, Five on the Fifth, LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines.