Rating: 
Summary: An interesting and profound novel about gender and identity
Review: Like many fans of the "Virgin Suicides," I was impatient to read another book by Eugenides. The author seems to be on the brink of something profound. In "Suicides" it was about motivation and secrets. Why did the girls kill themselves? This question seemed only partially answered. In "Middlesex" Eugenides once again takes on a taboo topic which is at different turns is both more and less successful than "Suicides." "Middlesex" is an important novel because it explodes certain myths about sex and gender. Eugenides' Callie/Cal bluntly states her/his position in the novel - he/she is both male and female. Nature didn't trump nurture and nurture didn't trump nature. They melded together to make her/him emotionally androgynous. This is the reason why I believe this novel is so profound. Life is frequently gray and Eugenides applies this basic principle to his novel. I particularly liked how Cal, even as a "man," states his dislike of other men. It reminds me of all the heterosexual men out there who playfully refer to themselves as lesbians. They're attracted to women, have true friendships with women, and generally can't stand the company of other men. To read all the relationship self-help books on the market you wouldn't even know that such men existed. Despite certain criticisms of this novel, the history of Callie's/Cal's family is extremely important to the story. It shows how the central character arrived at the final destination. Not only that, the long family history is quite interesting. I'm not sure why anyone would think it was boring to read about the destruction of Smyrna, life in a Greek village or immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and migrating west. These details only add further depth and meaning to the novel. It would have been nice to have more information about Cal's life as a man and what he went through in his evolution as an adult. But still, this is a minor detail overall. Eugenides sprinkles details about Cal's life as an adult throughout the novel. It would have been nice to have more information, 20 or so pages perhaps, about what it was like in his 20s. The other criticism which I have to agree with is Eugenides cutesy labeling of Callie's/Cal's brother as "Chapter Eleven." When I first saw this I thought that the publisher had made a printing error. I even did a search on the Internet to see if this was the case. It was simply distracting to read "Chapter Eleven" over and over and think of a real person. I can imagine this came up with Eugenides' editor at some point. I can even picture them debating about whether this was an effective way to be funny. Frankly, it wasn't. I think Eugenides could have said this was his brother's nickname, but to use this name over and over, without ever using the real name, was annoying and seemed contrived. Overall, I'd give "Middlesex" 4 1/2 stars. Eugenides' two novels have been so good, I just hope I don't have to wait another ten years for his next novel.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely fantastic!
Review: I loved this book! I have not read "Virgin Suicides", but have seen the movie, and found it very interesting. That was the main reason I wanted this book, and I haven't regretted it for a millisecond. The writing is out-of-this-world good, and the story is amazing. I laughed, I cried, I was totally engrossed. There were times I couldn't put this book down, and ended up reading until all wee hours of the night. I love coming-of-age
stories, and while Callie's story is very different from most such stories, it is certainly extremely interesting and wonderful.
Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Book
Review: This is one of the best books I've read in a very long time. Despite the unusual subject matter, this is a human and compassionate read. It is sweet, disturbing, evocative and touching. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of Detroit in the '60s, and the poignant "coming of age" viewpoint. Euginides is a master storyteller.
Rating:
Summary: A reader in Colorado
Review: Other reviewers have gone into detail about Middlesex, so I will keep this brief and say only that for lovers of contemporary fiction, this book is not to be missed. My feelings while reading it were the same as those I had with another great recent novel, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections: I simply didn't want it to end because I didn't know what I could possibly find next that would remotely compare. Readers who love this book will find themselves purposefully slowing their pace as the chapters wind down--a way of preserving the inevitable ending, and to delay having to say goodbye to this memorable and tenderly realized cast of characters.
Rating: 
Summary: Good if you skip the first couple hundred pages!
Review: I was surprised at this book after reading the reviews for it. The author should have skipped all the boring family background and got to Cal's story. Once Cal's story is being told, which is not for several hundred pages, the book takes off. I could barely skim the begining, with bits of Cal's dating woes sparsely scattered throughout.
Rating:
Summary: It teaches you to accept human diversity in a humorous way
Review: I couldn't praise enough this book. It teaches you all on making yourself accepted to yourself and the others. It teaches you of tolerance, of the fundamental thruth that we're all human despite our differences, no, because our differences. And it does this in a humorous, witty way. It has something of Laurence Sterne, and something of Saki: a bit of Rabelais and of Cyrano. It's also a poignant look on some of the wretched episodes of violence and hatred of which the past Twentieth century is so rich. I've loved this book. It'll makeyou laugh, and it'll make you think!
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Ok, so at age 14 Cal knows enough that he shouldn't be having an operation to reshape his genitalia so that he fits into society a little better. Truth be told, how many of us wouldn't do exactly as our parents and Dr. told us? We'd just want to be viewed as normal. At this point in the story, Cal became a hero with guts and determination, knowing that even if the rest of his life would be lonely, he would at least live it honestly.
The beginning of this book lead up to this point. This family cannot live without one another, even incestantly so. When Cal takes off, he knows it's for the best. All the other characters cannot seem to understand the ramifications of wallowing in each other for decades....
Rating:
Summary: Quite simply awesome!
Review: It seems all of the reviewers here want to try to match the heft of this awesome novel. Read it, you WILL enjoy it.
Rating:
Summary: The Greek Tragedy Revisited (may contain minor spoilers)
Review: Carefully avoiding melancholic self-pity, Cal unravels a tangled and incestuous family history for us, a history which ultimately results in the strangest personal tragedy of all: being born a girl and growing into a boy. In telling his story, Cal becomes omniscient, omnipresent narrator. He travels back in time to Greece in the early 20th Century so that he can unveil for us the family secret which would ultimately impact his own genetic makeup. He then methodically takes us forward in time to track the progress of these mutated chromosomes to his parents and, utlimately, to himself. He travels inside the minds and thoughts of family members, even delving into his father's last fantastic thoughts as his life ebbs away after a horrific car accident. Occasionally taking us forward in time to the present, Cal less clinically but just as authentically reveals his present circumstances, dodging intimacy lest his secret be discovered. There are moments in Middlesex when you may have to put the book down just to absorb what you have read. This is a testament to how real the characters are, and how surreal the events of everyday life can seem when witnessed from afar. Cal takes great pains to keep us at the audience level, witnesses but not collaborators, like the audience in the amphitheater during a Greek tragedy. Ultimately, however, this is not a story of how strange things are, but rather of how normal things become once we live with them a for while.
Rating: 
Summary: The Hybrid of Life
Review: I had initially dismissed Middlesex as a freakshow. For what other reason would someone pick up a novel about a hermaphrodite? Having been disenchanted with the more high-brow novels and their lack of entertainment value, I succumbed to Middlesex. As with the Virgin Suicide, Eugenides had me intrigued with his choice of unusual subjects and characters. The subject in question is one Ms/Mr (Cal)liope Stephanides, a hermaphrodite who is a descendant of complicated intermarriages (including grandparents who were brothers and sisters). The story envelopes more than Cal's life and stretches back to tell the story of her grandparents, their flight from certain death, and the anonymity of migrants that afforded them the freedom to pursue a forbidden romance. Cal's reason for telling the history of her/his family is to demonstrate the persistence of a deficient recessive gene that waited patiently across wars, journeys, and romances, to express itself in the body of an unknowing grandchild (Cal). The interludes such as the massacre in Smyrna and the Detroit riots were well-executed and added a much appreciated historical flavour to the novel. What is apparent in Middlesex is that this isn't merely a peek into abnormality. Cal and his/her questionable gender identity is also an embodiment of an adolescent in search of an identity, a metaphor for a migrant's displacement from their origin, and the hybridization of culture. Cal was one thing in childhood and by her teens, she discovers she is a he. Like migrants, you are born to be one nationality and then uprooted and assimilated into a new culture. And as an adolescent, the vulnerability and uncertainty of sexual awakening, and the crossroads at which you discover the adult emerging from a child's body, parallels Cal's journey. Migration, race, gender, and sexual awakening, will often ferment in us feelings of being 'freaks', an outsider, and the desperate search to find one's place in the world. Cal is not so extraordinary as he/she emboddies so much of what it is to grow up and to leave behind childhood, and/or nationality, and realise that the world does not remain static, that yourself - your mind and body - can grow and change, assimilate and embrace a new way to live, but oh, what a marvellous journey. The drawback of Middlesex is that it drags in certain places. It is also uneven in the sense that the grown-up Cal reveals very little about himself, but a great deal of the teenage Calliope. This creates an emotional gulf between the adult narrator and the reader - what is Cal like these days? What happened in the intervening years between his discovery and the commencement of his autobiography? On the other hand, I love being able to sit back with a novel and be entertained. Eugenides loves eccentric themes and peppers his novels with wry humour. You always receive the impression that here is a writer who loves what he does, and does not agonise over whether he will or will not be critically received. It is a enjoyable yet thought-provoking novel and should be highly commended for its bold and unusual exploration of identity.
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