Welcome, welcome, welcome to 2011. What a year this is going to be! And to start it all off, I am going to host a giveaway on my blog! WOOT! Yes, it’s my first giveaway, but I think you’re going to like it. Well, if you like reading books, that is.
A while back I received a copy of the book Middlesex from Jenners @ Life … With Books. It is a well-worn copy and a thrill to win because she wrote this innovative blog post about it with Sandy from You GOTTA Read This.
Written by the same author who wrote The Virgin Suicides, this book is a Pullitzer Prize winner.
“”I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver”s license…records my first name simply as Cal.”"
So begins 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 l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, 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. Lyrical and thrilling, “Middlesex “is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
Chapters.Indigo
This book did not disappoint. It was so well written and the characters described so vividly. Eugenides ability to describe what is going on inside Cal’s head as she discovers “she” is a “he” is so moving, and I imagine, quite accurate. I am sure no one who is going through something like that can describe all that they are thinking and feeling, but I would hope that they would read this book and say, “yeah, kind of like that.” He gives a voice to a minority, one that is still persecuted and vilified today. Although we don’t have freak shows anymore, there are definitely groups that are still considered “freaks” by many. We consider ourselves a pretty inclusive society. Martin Luther “had a dream”, women are successful in the workplace, even gay people have the right to marry (here in Ontario, at least), but there is still such a long way to go, no time to pat ourselves on the back just yet. People who don’t fall into “normal” gender roles are looked down on. There isn’t a lot of dialogue on people born with gender disorders and the immediate response is to “fix it”.
One of the things I really liked about Cal is the fact that he decided he didn’t want surgery to “fix” anything. That living as he did was good enough and all the problems that go with it would be better than living a lie and being reassigned as a woman. Cal’s journey is not so easy (he is a teenage girl, after all), it’s difficult enough being a teenager and going through puberty, without wondering why you are so obviously different. The other thing I really liked about this book was Cal’s relationships with others and how having a relationship as a teenage girl was just as fraught with mines as a relationship he tries to develop as an adult male. Yeah, being a teenage girl is hard and I can relate.
The book doesn’t just focus on Cal, Eugenides spends a lot of time telling the story of the family and how Cal ended up being born with this abnormailty. A persecuted family, his granparents flee to find a better life, but history ends up repeating itself in the felationships formed within the family. War, incest, and failure managed to follow them across the ocean with this mutated gene.
Jenners didn’t disappoint, as usual her recommendation was great. I loved this book so much I would like to pass it on to one of you! I would hope that in turn you would pass it on to someone else, because I really feel that this is a book worth reading.
I am giving away my one copy of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. It is open internationally (see inclusive like the book!). All you have to do is leave a comment with your email address to be entered to win. If you are a follower you get an extra entry, just leave a separate comment to let me know. The deadline is January 30th at 11:59pm est and the draw will be on January 31st. Good luck and tell your friends!
Yeah, That Just Happened!
