I just finished reading Middlesex, which a very sweet friend of mine thought was about Middlesex the county next to ours. It is most certainly not.
It was a great read, and I plowed through the end, but I can't put my finger on what held it back from being excellent. Perhaps it was all of the explicit talk about sexuality. I can be prudish at times, but that's not what it was. I think it was that the narrator just talked about it too much, and like any topic that's overdone, it gets old.
I wanted less talk of sex and more talk of gender. Why did the narrator make the choice she/he did? I wanted more on what mannerisms were hard and easy in the transition. What were the harder and easier parts of playing each gender? I wanted to know more about the struggle of familial acceptance. In the end, I felt like I only knew 3/4 of the narrator. Some intrigue is good, of course, but I was left too hungry.
1 comment:
I too enjoyed Middlesex, but felt it lacked something. For me, I think it was that I felt there was no coherent point that the narrator was making. I felt like it was a book where the author wondered "What would it be like to be intersex?" but never took it a step further.
I wanted a "So What" moment at the end where the story connected to something greater rather than staying so wrapped up in itself.
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