I find it impossible to give "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides a toaster pastry rating.  I wouldn’t want anyone to not read a Jeffrey Eugenides book because of me.  Even though I didn’t care for this book, I will definitely give him another chance. I can tell that he is a brilliant guy. However, I wouldn’t want anyone to read "Middlesex" because of me.

 Maybe it was the Holden Caulfield reference on the back cover. You know who else would’ve hated so many main characters being compared to Holden Caulfield?  Holden Caulfield!  This book is  why I didn’t read Pulitzer Prize winners for so long, I just knew I wouldn’t understand them, or like them. What’s worse is that I got the feeling that this book was written to be shocking, to win a Pulitzer, & to be the next Holden Caulfield, it wasn’t written to bring a sense of humanity to the misunderstood.  It’s the book that just tried too hard.  The more I learned about the main character, including 300+ pages of family history (I don’t even know my own family that well) the less sense she made to me, the less human she became. It didn’t help that I had very high expectations, several people told me it was the best book ever, in my opinion, it wasn’t. What did you think of this book?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.