Truly as wonderful as the reviews and its reputation suggest. 3 highly intelligent, yet flawed Brown University grads cope with their expectations for life and love, while coming to grip with their own shortcomings. A beautiful novel.

Ugh. The writing was beautiful and filled with fantastic detail, but I put it away halfway through because I just couldn't get behind ANY of the characters. I actually hated the three main ones and couldn't stomach spending time with them when there are so many other great characters/stories out there. So, it's a preference thing. If you're okay with reading minute details about people you may strongly dislike in real life, then I would recommend this book. Otherwise, pass.

Tragic and hilarious by turns, with three compelling characters, a semester's worth of ideas and a magical sense of time and place. What more could one ask for in a novel?

If you're expecting Middlesex, just go back and read Middlesex. I enjoyed this, but it just doesn't give me the same compelling drive to read that his previous novels did.

A young college grad, Madeleine Hanna, pens an English lit thesis that posits people wouldn’t know how to fall in love and marry if it weren’t for novels that described this experience (See opening quote).There are two young men in her life, Leonard Bankhead, a manic depressive with whom she is in “love,” and Mitchell, a cerebral and emotional long-time friend who is in “love” with Madeleine, an emotional state he grapples with as he sorts out what he believes about god and religion. The novel follows the lives of these three people in the months after graduation as they come to terms with the direction their lives will take. Both young men are obsessed in different ways and this contrast is what gives texture to the novel. I thought the idea of basing an entire novel on a thesis written for an English lit course is ill-conceived and, I'm afraid, a tad boring. The book takes more than 50 pages to get past a listing of novels before it tackles the main focus of the plot. I needed to be reread these pages after I finished the book, to understand properly why they are there in the first place. Literary fiction should appeal to a larger audience than people studying literature at the university level. Leonard is an interesting character, though, and his predicament fuels the book. An okay read, but not really compelling.

A young college grad, Madeleine Hanna, pens an English lit thesis that posits people wouldn’t know how to fall in love and marry if it weren’t for novels that described this experience (See opening quote).There are two young men in her life, Leonard Bankhead, a manic depressive with whom she is in “love,” and Mitchell, a cerebral and emotional long-time friend who is in “love” with Madeleine, an emotional state he grapples with as he sorts out what he believes about god and religion. The novel follows the lives of these three people in the months after graduation as they come to terms with the direction their lives will take. Both young men are obsessed in different ways and this contrast is what gives texture to the novel. I thought the idea of basing an entire novel on a thesis written for an English lit course is ill-conceived and, I'm afraid, a tad boring. The book takes more than 50 pages to get past a listing of novels before it tackles the main focus of the plot. I needed to be reread these pages after I finished the book, to understand properly why they are there in the first place. Literary fiction should appeal to a larger audience than people studying literature at the university level. Leonard is an interesting character, though, and his predicament fuels the book. An okay read, but not really compelling.

I loved this book. It was brutal at times, to read about Leonard's Manic Depression, but I thought the novel was well balanced between the characters. Madeline's character was, of the three, the more difficult to understand, but I thought she was a well-conceived privileged daughter. Essentially, the novel, to me, was about the nature of charity and love and how the two are realized in the lives of three people.

It's not Eugenides' best, but then again I've always been oddly disappointed by his novels. This one in particular had potential to resonate - after all, I'm a similarly confused recent English graduate, albeit one who dislikes Austen - but it never seemed to go much of anywhere. A year or two of mistakes to be erased, and then the characters will move on with their lives. Extremely un-momentous.

Nicely written prose but the story itself wasn't very compelling, and the book was hard to get through. It never captivated me, and I only finished it because I'm one of those people who simply can't NOT finish a book once I've started. But honestly, I was quite bored with it.

I really enjoyed this read, and I can't wait to read more Eugenides.