As a girl, he never felt comfortable with his body. Maybe it was my relationship with the Detroit setting, but Cal’s journey struck a cord with me. I’ll add that I listened to the audiobook of Middlesex and the narrator was incredible and certainly added to my enjoyment of this story. The nuances of Cal’s story make this book very rich and full of the wonderful details that sucked me into the story. This overview is a gross simplification of the plot. When the specialist recommends cosmetic surgery and hormone injection to retain her feminine identity, Calliope flees and becomes Cal. Calliope’s questions about her gender identity and seeming homosexuality become more confusing when she reaches puberty until she is finally referred to a specialist in New York. When Cal is born as Calliope, no one suspects that the seeming young girl will grow into a man.

When Cal’s older brother (code named Chapter 11) is born, nothing is out of the ordinary. Milton goes on to marry his second cousin, Lina’s daughter Tessie. Desdemona and Lefty survive the 20s and 30s in Detroit and produce two children, Zoe and Milton. To escape the villagers who would criticize them, they escape and flee to Detroit to live with their cousin, Lina, the only person privy to their secrets. This is complicated because they are brother and sister. The plot begins in Turkey near the Greek border where Cal’s grandparents Desdemona and Lefty decide that they should get married. The text bounces between Cal in his 40s living in Berlin and his story through the 20th century. The story is fictional and told from a mix of first and third person points of view as Cal retells his story. Middlesex tells the story of inter-sexual Cal Stephanides as he traces his roots back to Greece and follows the genes that led to his condition.

Middlesex novel review