Title: Middlesex
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Publisher: Picador 2002
Genre: Literature
Pages: 544
Rating: 4/5 stars
Reading Challenges: Historical Fiction; Mount TBR; Book Bingo - 4 from everyone but me; 52 Books - W44; Rory Gilmore; 1001 Books; Fall into Reading
How I Got It: iPad Read (Book Club Selection)
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license...records my first name simply as Cal."
So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
This has been on my TBR list for years, but I've always been scared to dive in. The subject matter is extremely serious. How do we approach the subject of intersex? Overall, I think Eugenides does a great job approaching the topic from a unique angle. Cal is an intriguing character and narrator. I found those the parts about Cal's life to be fascinating. The first half of the book focusing on Desdemona and Lefty and Milton and Tessie dragged a bit. The first half was difficult to connect to. Because of my reluctance to dive completely into the book, I knocked off a star.