Read This Book

In his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides describes an old custom where passengers on ships bound for America would hold the ends of balls of yarn, and their loved ones on shore would hold the wound ball. As the ships left harbor, those left behind would watch the ball rotate and unravel as their dear ones grew farther and farther away yet remained connected to them.

This book is like that. Threads connect the past to the present to the future, from Asia Minor across the Atlantic to Detroit, across America to San Francisco, and across the world to modern-day Berlin. They connect the characters, and tie the different parts of the characters to themselves. Strands weave through history, leading us along. They wind their way between words and lines and bind the reader to the story itself, so that even days after you've closed the book for the final time, it's still a part of you.

Middlesex is a great epic and yet a deeply personal story, told from the persepective of an intersex individual who is raised a girl in a Greek-American family in 1960s Detroit, until she hits puberty and begins to realize she is not what she and everyone else thought she was. But the story is about so much more than that: love, sex, family, American adolescence, race, gender, money, genetics. Skillfully crafted, it deserves all the critical acclaim it received as well as your can't-put-it-down attention. It's beautiful and haunting, hilarious and tragic. You will be so sad to finish it.