Michigan

Jill said, "Hi, Bonnie: I finished Middlesex for this challenge, which was set in Detroit, Michigan. While I was disappointed with the book, I did learn a lot about Detroit throughout the 20th century, and that part was interesting. Here's my review."

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides was the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was nominated for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, and was a 2002 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Transgender. Just threw that in to counter Jill's disappointment with the book.

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them, along with Callie's failure to develop, leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia, back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.

Spanning eight decades and one unusually awkward adolescence, this novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.
__________

Teddy Rose has also reviewed Middlesex.