Rating: 
Summary: My Big Fat Greek Book
Review: Don't let the length and 'epic' style narration fool you: the Stephanides family is uninteresting. Eugenides attempts a Philip Roth/Saul Bellow-ish 'american novel', where social-economic, geo-political commentaries are made. The problem is Eugenides re-spits out verbatim what every intelligent writer has been hashing out since the 70's. The form is getting tired. War is bad, okay. Racism is bad, okay. Postmodern fragmentation has left us all exiled and feeling 'special'. Cookie cutter suburbia is boring and intolerant, okay. Yes, yes, we know. It's time to call those self satified people at the National Book Award and the Pulitzer- we got yet another novel that woes the critics with its use of italics and sensitive moments.To concede, there's nothing inherently wrong with this book- it's a well-hearted benign story that somebody wanted to write. And of course, this is a free country and we can read and give awards to any book we want. I'm simply asserting my public forum right to say this: As somebody who loves to read, and has read many great books, I found this book extremely predictable, passive, and too self-aware of its own importance.
Rating: 
Summary: A Resounding Novel
Review: When I first heard about Middlesex on NPR, I was intrigued. Yet, like many intriguing things, it soon became buried beneath the daily worries of making lunches, writing thank-you cards, and research papers. It was only last month that, with the help of my English teacher's open reading assignment, I remembered Middlesex. Thank God I did! Middlesex is, simply, a beautiful book. The story itself is fascinating: a girl who discovers as a teenager that she is a hermaphrodite and chooses to become a man. The detail is extraordinary - silkworms appear throughout the novel as a leading and touching symbol. The background is amazing: in fact, much of the first half of the book concerns Cal/Callie's parents and grandparents. As Cal himself says, "I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival." It is only in the second half that Cal him/herself comes into a major role. Yet, throughout the book, Cal is definitely the narrator, from his grandparents' flight from Turkey to his own dates with Julie in modern post-September 11 Berlin. Yet, what makes Middlesex unique is Jeffrey Eugenides' writing. He treats a complicated subject with a finesse and sheer beauty which is rarely encountered. "Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olymps, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped...how it blew like a seed across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother's own midwestern womb. Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That's genetic, too." Seamlessly, he alternates between lyrical philosophical passages and conversations between two teenage girls. Past and present and future are all fluid and one doesn't even notice it until afterwards. Well, I said I read Middlesex for my English class and so I did. Two people read the novel with me. One, like me, fell totally in love with it. The other, who loves zombie movies and guts and gore, hated it. His main complaint was that there was too much of a focus on sex. Yet, although that is on the surface the subject of the book, it's really not at all. It's about a person's search for their own identity. The characters are all essentially human - to not empathize with them would take a skill I simply lack. Callie is touching and absorbing - her search to find herself and define who she is and why she's here, is one which confronts everybody. "Was it love or reproduction? Chance or destiny?" Callie, like all of us, struggles to explain the meaning of her existence. For those of you who adore "Night of the Living Dead" and "2 Fast 2 Furious" more than life itself, Middlesex is not for you. But...on second thought, I take it back. Read it anyway. You'll like it or not, but I'll bet you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Rating: 
Summary: Well written, engaging character and good story
Review: I'm a sucker for a good story, and if it's a good story with a character that draws me in, I'm hooked. Middlesex did that for me. This is the first by Eugenides that I've read, although I plan to pick up Virgin Suicides eventually. The only part I wasn't too crazy about was the "present day" plot, the relationship between the protagonist and the woman he meets in Germany. Not that there was anything really really wrong with it, it just didn't ring true for me ... I was convinced of everything else in the novel except that. Still, a good read of the stuff that's come out in past couple years. I recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: The best book I've read this year
Review: I finished this book in record time and now I wish I had savored it a little more. This is not just the story of hermaphrodite Cal Stephanides but also the history of his family. The book goes back to Greece where his grandparents are forced by war to emigrate and brings us through their lives and their children's lives to the birth and strange life of Cal. Anyone born in the Detroit area should read this purely for the history, but I recommend it to everyone as the best book I've read this year.
Rating:
Summary: Middlesex was Magnificent!!
Review: My friends and I picked this book for an extra credit assignment for my English class. The book had won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize and we decided that the book was "about a hermaphrodite, but not really because it's a Pulitzer Prize winning book and those books are never REALLY about what they're about." The book was really an enjoyable read. If the stirring story of three generations of Greek-Americans, a teenage hermaphrodite, and an "interesting adolescence" don't suck you in immediately (Have you no soul!!!?) then Eugenides crafting of the novel certainly will. He is a hermaphroditic as well; a classical and contemporary novelist all in one. He utilizes an amazing modern prose style of narration as well as a great grasp of conversational dialogue. It's a long novel, but it never gets to the point of seeming inpenetrable and "dense". If the story of the hermaphrodite is the main attraction, be forewarned; she isn't born until halfway through the novel, but she still narrates the whole novel. The book is an experience; it provides the chance to live through possibly this century's most provacative, insightful and imaginative narrator ever.
Rating:
Summary: Historical and topical both
Review: It is the story of a girl who finds out when she's 14 that due to a genetic defect, she is actually a guy. It also follows the story of his parents and grandparents, tracing the recent history of the genetic mutation to show how he ended up the way he did.
The book is set in the 1920s to the present, follows the grandparents emigration to America from Grece and their struggles to establish themselves. It covers the parents and Cal growing up in the 1960s and 70s in Detroit and Grosse Pointe, to the present day Cal, working for the US state department in Germany.
I found it an engaging read, but I really like historic-snapshot thingies. So if you don't, you might not.
Rating:
Summary: A complete waste of time
Review: The only interesting thing about this book is the praise it received. The writing is tedious and the characters are annoyingly predictable. I have 6 pages left and I could care less if I finish it. Regrets? That I paid full price and wasted precious time being seduced by jacket praise and awards mention. If you must see for yourself, borrow a copy.
Rating: 
Summary: almost good
Review: At times a good story well told. The middle section is quite gripping but the books suffers from forrest-gumpism, tired listing in passages, charicaturish places and people, and postmodernist interjections that feel like explanatory outbursts someone might offer at a book group discussing this novel. Geez, don't you trust us the reader to figure anyting out. Also his chops just aren't that great.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and engaging!
Review: Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex is a terrific novel -- enthralling from beginning to end. It is the story of Cal and his/her struggles with sexual ambiguity. Although raised as a girl, Cal has lived a rather confused and alienated life. Is Cal a hermaphrodite, or is it something else? There are some interesting twists throughout the novel. Don't let the dark subject matter fool you. Middlesex is filled with wonderful, earnest humor. The language is beautiful and engaging. The story development is excellent and the dialogue is brilliant. You won't be able to put this book down. Highly recommended...
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: Eugenides is more flowery of a writer than Sue Monk Kidd (Secret Life of Bees) of Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), but he still creates readable and interesting people. I absolutely agree that Eugenides writes characters that are as interesting as those written by Rikki Lee Travolta (My Fractured Life), but without the Tennessee Williams tone. The story structure is akin to Yann Martell (Life of Pi).
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