This month, I reread the upper middle grade novel Tangerine by Edward Bloor. I remembered loving it as a kid, but that was about all I remembered. So, I got to reread the story with completely fresh eyes.

Tangerine turned out to be a well-written, thought-provoking story that dealt with very mature themes in a manner appropriate for this age group. But what really blew me away about this book was how much it taught me about setting.

Tangerine takes place in the fictional town of Tangerine, Florida. One thing that continually impressed me as I moved through the story was that Tangerine felt like a character itself. I wondered: How did the author pull this off? Because, to be honest, I wouldn’t say Edward Bloor was particularly gifted at writing rich physical descriptions of place—which was fine. His writing style, at least in this book, was spare and simple, perfectly suited to the voice of his middle-school-aged protagonist. But there were no lush, gorgeous, waxing-poetic descriptions of the town of Tangerine.

No, I decided, there must be more to setting than its descriptions. So, I set about analyzing the techniques Edward Bloor used to make the town of Tangerine come alive. This is what I learned.

The place is intriguing from the get-go.

In Tangerine, fires burn underground for years on end. The protagonist’s school is built on a sinkhole, which eventually swallows up the classrooms. Lightning strikes the football field at the same time every day. This is all so unusual, to both the reader and the protagonist, that we can’t help but want to see more of this bizarre place.

However, quirks alone are not enough to bring your setting to life. These elements are a hint at what’s to come. They’re a promise to the reader. It’s your job, as the writer, to deliver on that promise and fully flesh out your setting beyond these superficialities.

The place has a history.

Tangerine was built on, and named after, tangerine farming. But after decades of relying on farming, the town experienced an artificial real estate development boom—caused by a crooked government official who took bribes in exchange for waiving safety inspections on new buildings. As a result, people flocked to the new, beautiful neighborhoods in Tangerine. Now they’re stuck there, as their shoddily built houses begin to fall apart and become impossible to sell.

That all of this backstory was fleshed out in the novel made Tangerine believable. Because it had a history, it felt like a real place.

The place has an identity.

Although Tangerine’s history made it feel real, it’s the town’s sense of identity that really made it come alive. The town was built on, and even named after, its original livelihood. Many of its residents still grow tangerines to feed their families, and now they’re struggling to maintain that way of life. We witness this during a freeze, when one such family calls in all their children and their schoolmates to help keep the trees alive overnight.

As a result, we get the sense that the town of Tangerine has an identity. It’s been shaped by its history, just like any human character. It has its own motives. We get the sense that, like the trees struggling to survive the freeze and the tangerine workers struggling to maintain their way of life, so too is the town of Tangerine struggling to maintain its identity.

The place is intimately connected to the plot.

In Tangerine, you can’t have one without the other. If the protagonist’s family had not moved to this particular town, the story would not have happened as it did. Over and over, I witnessed the setting impacting the plot and vice versa. The sinkhole that swallows the school forces the protagonist to attend another school, which launches the central plot. The termites down the street cause the neighbors’ houses to be covered in pesticide-filled tents, which allows the protagonist’s malicious older brother to commit a string of thefts. Elements of the protagonist’s neighborhood remind him of distant memories, which eventually bring to light his family’s disturbing secret.

No matter where your story is set, it must be set there for a reason. Choose and develop your setting to maximize its effect on the rest of the story. Make it impact the plot. Make it give rise to obstacles for the main character. Make it behave as a character itself.

The place echoes the story’s themes.

I loved how the history of the town of Tangerine kept resurfacing, literally and figuratively. The shoddy buildings constructed years ago start to fall apart around their current residents. The tangerine groves hastily plowed under to make room for housing developments cause termites to eat those developments from the ground up. When residents try to extinguish the underground fires with water, they fail—and cause swarms of mosquitoes to move in. Though the townspeople remain hellbent on conforming Tangerine to their standards of beauty, the town’s identity refuses to be stifled.

This echoes the central theme of the book. The plot hinges on a traumatic incident in the protagonist’s childhood, an incident he can’t remember. As the story progresses, his memories gradually resurface—as does the psychopathic nature of his older brother, who caused the incident in the first place. The boys’ parents have tried to cover up the incident, brush it under the rug, and hope it will go away. But, like everything else in Tangerine, the past keeps coming back to haunt them.

There you have it: the elements of a great setting. There’s obviously much more to it than how you describe it. How you construct your setting—the history and identity you provide for it, the way you intertwine it with the story’s plot and themes—that’s the real challenge.

How do you master this? Start by reading and rereading your favorite books and exploring how those authors use their settings to great effect.