The Carolina Women’s Center has chosen its recommended summer reading: Middlesex. Written by Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex is the story of a hermaphroditic child, “Callie” and her journey to adulthood. No doubt the CWC chose it for the writer’s ability to “transcend the stereotypes of gender.”
From Amazon:
“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the “roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time.” The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
I’m not sure if this is better or worse than the official UNC-Chapel Hill book choice, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights.
