Middlesex tells 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 1967 before moving 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.
Book Magazine (4 ½ Stars)
Highly compressed, explosively sudden comparisons are Eugenides' forte. Some are charmingly written….Others have the force of poetry....When Eugenides deals not in metaphor but in historical detail, he imbues facts with the same piquancy as his imagination....A great-hearted novel.
Elle Middlesex…concerns the turbulent awakening of sexual impulses and identity, and combines a gently ironic humor with an obsessive, shimmering nostalgia that the author traces with vivid intelligence and precision....The flagrantly talented Eugenides turns the fascinating, improbable story of hermaphrodite Calliope Stephanides…into a 500-plus-page saga that begins with Cal's forebears on the slopes of Mount Olympus and ends in a deeply felt moment of self-realization.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
Eugenides maps out a territory where all kinds of love, memories and despairs engage readers and then evanesce....This fiction is a revelation of originality and vast invention.
The Christian Science Monitor
A novel of extraordinary flexibility, scope, and emotional depth.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
Part Tristram Shandy, part Ishmael, part Holden Caulfield, Cal is a wonderfully engaging narrator.... A deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American 20th century.
People
Daring and inventive....An epic....This feast of a novel is thrilling in the scope of its imagination and surprising in its tenderness.
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
Unprecedented, astounding....praiseworthy, prizeworthy.
Vanity Fair
Eugenides' gift is to take subject matter that could easily devolve into tabloid fodder and instead mine it for delightfully weird, dark-hued comedy and highly original plotting.
Houston Chronicle
Eugenides' generosity toward his characters is the hallmark of the novel.
Philadelphia City News Middlesex is a gloriously ambitious, resonantly humane story about the inalienable human right to be oneself.
Detroit Free Press
At last Detroit has its great novel. What Dublin got from James Joyce—a sprawling, ambitious, loving, exasperated and playful chronicle of all its good and bad parts—Detroit has from native son Eugenides.
Denver Post
Eugenides writes a sweeping tale, incorporating the structure of the Greek myths into the angst-ridden world of teen sexual desire. He pulls together the strands of genocide, Prohibition bootlegging, race riots and middle-class striving into a romantic, cohesive novel.
W Magazine
A truly extraordinary yarn....In a worthy bid for Great American Noveldom, Eugenides covers the tremendous swath of 20th-century history, from the automobile assembly lines of 1920s Detroit to the formation of the Nation of Islam…from a Prohibition-era speakeasy to a private-school locker room in 1970s Grosse Pointe. This sort of greatest-hits Odyssey can easily get out of hand…but Eugenides pulls it off with dazzling artistry and a deceptively light-fingered style.
School Library Journal - Enoch Pratt Free Library
Adult/High School-Mostly, the novel remains a universal narrative of a girl who's happy to grow up but hates having to leave her old self behind. Readers will love watching the narrator go from Callie to Cal, and witnessing all of the life experiences that get her there.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
With Middlesex, a mirror-house love poem to his Greek 'Family,' Jeffrey Eugenides proves he has literary muscle second to none.
Men's Journal At some point this fall, at a cocktail party or in some similarly chatty setting, you will overhear people talking about the 'hermaphrodite novel' and pressing the book upon others with the fervor of evangelical missionaries. So here's your heads-up The title is Middlesex; the author is Jeffrey Eugenides; yes, it's that good; and yes, it's about a hermaphrodite....But Middlesex is about a hermaphrodite in the way that Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel is about a teenage boy....Middlesex was nine years in the writing, and it's easy to see why; a novel of chance, family, sex, surgery, and America, it contains multitudes.
The Washington Post Book World
He has simply gotten better and better.
Bookpage Middlesex is anything but ordinary. It is 'out there' in the best sense—a wry, unpredictable and ultimately wise book....It is funny and poignant and mythical, and very hard to put down.
USA Today
This is a big book, so wildly imaginative that it borders on the bizarre, and yet so warm-hearted that it's hard to resist.
Entertainment Weekly (A-)
Bighearted....Middlesex is a novel of roots and rootlessness....all in pieces, as all big family stories are, bursting the boundaries of logic.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Beautifully written....Eugenides has an extraordinary sensitivity....This is one determinedly literary novel that should also appeal to a large, general audience.
Library Journal
Starred Review. From the beginning, the reader is brought into a world rich in culture and history, as Eugenides extends his plot into forbidden territories with unique grace....Once again, Eugenides proves that he is not only a unique voice in modern literature but also well versed in the nature of the human heart. Highly recommended.
The New York Times Book Review
Expansive and radiantly generous....Deliriously American.
Salman Rushdie Middlesex…is a wonderfully rich, ambitious novel—it deserves to be a huge success.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Miriam Just didn't like it I am glad to read one person called Lucas calling this book mediocre. It is mediocre. I love reading and I didn't finish this book. I am an open minded person but sex between brother and sister is not in my list of acceptable behaviour.
Rated of 5
by BookBarbie Good to the last word!!! Every january Our Martinis and Manuscripts, my book group, reads the Pulitzer-winning novel for the past year.
Over the years we have had some winners and a few big time losers. Then came 2003 and WOW! This book is worth every page...our highest... Read More
Rated of 5
by kay What's all the praise for??? I could hardly wait to finish this novel, not because it was so good, but because it was sooooo long.The story got lost in its over 500 pages of narrative, internal pov, Cal's pov & everyone else's pov, confusing back-story, jumping around in time... Read More
Rated of 5
by Dorothy When is it going to end... Overall, I loved the book. I did not mind "chapter 11". The thing that annoyed me the most was the drawn out, "every little detail" descriptions throughout the book. At the start of the book, I did not mind as it gave me a feel of Greece and the... Read More
Rated of 5
by Tess Peer Quickie What is the symbolic function of the house?
Rated of 5
by Crystalee Unexpectingly Good I had to read this book for a class, and I was very surprised that it turned out to be one of my favorite books of the semester. It's about a hermaphrodite, but it's about so much more. I would highly recommend it, even to people who are turned... Read More
Meet Burt Hecker - a mead-drinking, tunic-wearing medieval re-enactor from upstate New York in Tod Wodicka's debut, a modern-day Arthurian quest that introduces one of the most winning oddball characters to come along in years.
Award-winning Canadian author Kathleen Winter’s Annabel is a stunning debut novel about the family of a mixed-gendered child born into a rural hunting community in the 1960s.
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Its board approved the...
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