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Book Description
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school, Grosse Pointe, MI, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde 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. 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, 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.
Sprawling across eight decades - and one unusually awkward adolescence - Jeffrey Eugenide's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.
It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
Sprawling across eight decades - and one unusually awkward adolescence - Jeffrey Eugenide's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.
It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
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- Book Details
- English Books
- Rating:



(152)
4 stars 
3 stars 
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1 star 
- Audio Cassette
- Edition: Unabridged
- ISBN-10: 1559277807
- ISBN-13: 9781559277808
- Publisher: Audio Renaissance
- Pub date: Sep 04, 2002
- Also available as: Mass Market Paperback, Paperback, Hardcover, Audio CD, Audio Cassette, School & Library Binding and Others
- In other languages:

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About my hometown: Detroit/Grosse Pointe. The descriptions of familiar places felt exactly right.
"In the eighteenth row my grandmother gave her critical opinion. 'It's lke the paintings in the museum,' she said. 'Just an excuse to show people with no clothes.'"
"All of a sudden American wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was bout ... Continue
"In the eighteenth row my grandmother gave her critical opinion. 'It's lke the paintings in the museum,' she said. 'Just an excuse to show people with no clothes.'"
"All of a sudden American wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was bout something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!"
"Shakes your hand while he pisses in your pocket"
"The most widely raised type of silkworm, the larva of the Bombyx mori, no longer exists anywhere in a natural state. As my encyclopedia poignantly puts it: 'The legs of the larvae have dgenerated, and the adults do not fly'"
Better than "The Virgin Suicides," although Eugenides's prose can occasionally be tiresome.
This beautifully written book is more than a story of a hermaphrodite. It is a rich family history interwoven with the history of Greek immigrants, as well as a history of life in the Detroit area from the early auto industry through the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. I liked all the characters ... Continue
This beautifully written book is more than a story of a hermaphrodite. It is a rich family history interwoven with the history of Greek immigrants, as well as a history of life in the Detroit area from the early auto industry through the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. I liked all the characters from the grandparents Desdemona and Lefty through the narrator, Cal/Callie.
This book needs more than 4 stars.