Eugenides' Middlesex
This book is divided into two parts with the first part being a family epic that follows the style of 100 Years of Solitude minus the magical realism and the second part being a coming of age story told in a more serious way about a hermaphrodite. To me the two parts did not marry well. Things like massacres and incest are treated inherently more lightly than being a hermaphrodite and that made me have to change gears too much while reading it.
The style of the book is between Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon, both of whom, I think are overrated writers. Eugenides is similarly overrated and he writes without a first hand knowledge of suffering. The book is OK, but its nothing special and is destined to be forgotten.
I found that the book lost me as I went along and I was progressively less interested in it. Even towards the end I was pushing myself forward on it. It won a Pulitzer Prize, something which I am increasingly coming to believe means nothing.
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