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BRILLIANT Eugenides deserves every bit of the Pulitzer prize he won for this amazing story. I cannot recall a more original, well-written, well-paced novel. The deftness with which Euginides skips through time and jumps from one character's point-of-view to another's is, from a writer's viewpoint, stunning. The story is so convincing and unique that it is hard to believe Euginides didn't live through it all himself. To say that Middlesex is about a hermaphrodite would be incomplete and give an incorrect impression. While the main character is indeed a boy who was raised half his life as a girl, the story is more about what makes a person who he is. Sprawling in scope, the story begins several generations before the birth of our narrator, Cal Stephanides, in Greece. It follows Cal's grandparents as they flee a war to America and settle in Detroit. It is an immigrant song and a history lesson, and the first act of a Greek tragedy, as Cal's grandparents are also brother and sister. This incestuous coupling leads to a gene mutation that will, two generations later, culminate with the birth of our narrator. Despite its physical girth (500+ pages), Middlesex is a surprisingly fast read. This is a testament to both Eugenides's writing and seamless plotting. Not once, even though it is 125 pages before the narrator is even born, does the story drag. Not once did I flip forward to see how many more pages were left in the chapter. If anything, I wanted more. Cal's narration is engaging and likable, á la Holden Caulfield, and even though he tells the story as a thirty-five-year-old, he nails perfectly the confusion of a young teenager trying to find himself. That's where the greatest strength of this novel lies: even though the narrator has more to discover than the average teenager, the emotion and turmoil of what he experiences is completely relatable. Because of this, the story becomes not about freakishness, but about what is most human in all of us. It's an incredibly ambitious undertaking for a second novel, and Eugenides pulls it off brilliantly. I could not recommend this book more.