Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Opening lines like these can't help but draw a reader in; I immediately wanted to know more about this person who was born first as a girl and then as a boy. But in the next hundred pages or so we are taken back to his grandparents' life in Greece and subsequent immigration to the US in the 1920s. Interesting to a point, but I wanted to know more about Callie than I did her family's strange incestuous history. As we get closer in time to the present telling of the story (or retelling as it is narrated by Cal, the now man, in a sort of 'my life' story) I found it really picked up, was more relevant and interesting. I like the author's writing style and even how he uses an omniscient point of view, jumping from first person to third and back again. By the end of the book I completely forgave its odd beginning in light of the quirky and sweet coming-of-age story that it ended up being.


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 they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Point, 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. (back cover)

I was born twice: first as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petroskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. (opening lines)