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Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides.
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux: 2002 (hardcover). ISBN:
0374199698.
529 pages.
Guide not available
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Are you ready to read the Single Greatest American Hermaphrodite Epic of the Twenty-First century? You bet you are! And that's why it was so cool of Jeffrey Eugenides, he of The Virgin Suicides fame, to write it for us. Meet Calliope Stephanides, who is soon to become your absolute favorite Intersex character in all of literature.
OK, we're done with our painful attempts at cute and witty-we'll turn it over to Mr. Eugenides' infinitely superior wit to present this delightful story and character. "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 Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." That's the first sentence, and with that irresistible lure, Eugenides reels us in-hook, line, and sinker-for the next 500 pages of a truly unique and important novel. Like one out of every two thousand kids born in America, Calliope arrived in this world with an ambiguous set of primary sexual characteristics. But Calliope doesn't know this for the first fourteen years of her life, nor do her parents, nor her friends, or her brother. The only people who might have some information to impart on this subject, if they had any idea of the problem, are Callie's grandparents, who have carried a guilty secret all the way from Greece, which they fled during the last days of the Ottoman Empire. And they sure aren't talking. But Eugenides does. He takes us all the way back to the Old World to follow a forbidden love affair across the Atlantic and into the once-clean streets of Detroit during the glory days of the Motor City, through the unrest of the 1960's race riots, and finally to a second generation's immigration to the heart of suburbia. It's truly a great American story, but it's also the story of a person who must confront the heart of a gender identity that most of us never have to think about twice. This is a novel about what it means to be a boy, and a girl, and all the places in between--and creates an amazing potential for a crazy-good discussion.
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