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Suzanne
Rating:
 
Review
Calliope, who's supposed to be the main character of this novel, doesn't appear much until halfway through the story, which is a shame. I liked Calliope more than anyone else in the book, and I wish more of the story had been about her. "Cal" was born with both male and female sex traits, but this doesn't become apparent to anyone until she reaches puberty. I was surprised at how much I could relate to her, in spite of our obvious differences, and it cracked me up how she idolized her first classmate crush as "the obscure object". Cal is the heartwarming, awkward star that makes this story shine. Unfortunately, I had to read through the first half of the book to get to all this, and the first half was a slow slog, comprising her grandparents' and parents' life sagas without much of a real plot. Her Greek grandparents immigrated to Detroit in the 1920's. While it quickly becomes clear why you need to know about them, I thought this knowledge could have been imparted over the course of a couple pages, with the rest of it left out or made into a completely separate book. If you have a special interest in Detroit, there's a lot to recommend the first part of the book; otherwise, it seemed like so many other stories of immigration and assimilation.
Best Line:
"I was realizing that I wasn't the only faker around." (pg. 383)
Kim
Rating:
Review
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this hefty novel's heroine/hero is Callie/Cal. She/he is a hermaphrodite, and for the first 14 years of life, she's a girl. Then, due to a few fateful events, she decides to continue life as a he, and though it seems to make more sense to Cal from that point forward, his life is far from simple. From the very beginning, the story switches from current Cal to his young life as Callie, and amazingly, it's not confusing in the least. Callie and Cal are both engaging and endearing, making this story worthy of a Pulitzer. I thought Callie's description of her "crocus" was dead-on, and all the interesting factoids about Detroit were fun. This is a long book though – epic comes to mind – and I understand why there was so much background on some of the characters, Cal's grandparents Desdemona and Lefty especially, but pul-eese. The first 150 pages were sleep-inducing, but I'm glad I stuck with it. I'm considering reading the author's earlier novel, The Virgin Suicides, since the guy certainly knows his way around a story.
Best Line:
"With a final rip, the dress split in two and Desdemona lay on the linoleum, exposing to the world the misery of her underwear, her overburdened underwire brassiere, her gloomy underpants, and the frantic girdle whose stays she was even now popping as she approached the summit of her dishevelment."
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