This is the story of three young adults attending Brown University in 1982 where the author went to school. It is a coming of age story which begins on graduation day, gives us a glimpse of their connectedness on campus, and continues during their post graduate years.
The lives of Madeline Hanna, an aspiring writer; Leonard Bankhead, struggling with mental illness; and Mitchell Grammaticus, searching for spiritual strength are intertwined throughout the book. This is a book that I did not enjoy, and I had difficulty being interested enough in the characters to care about them. Their backgrounds were never really revealed except in the case of Madeline whose parents play a small role. I found it particularly painful to follow Madeline's struggles with Leonard's mental illness and understand her reasons for marrying him. More than once I wanted to shake some sense into Mitchell. In the end, their lives and problems were unresolved, and though that is often the case in real life, there was still enough missing in the story to make me not recommend this book.
Eugenides also wrote "The Virgin Sucides" which I found much more interesting and "Middlesex' which won a Pulitzer Prize, but again was not a book that I enjoyed.
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