girl's but heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a beaver's tail". According to Penelope Music of Book Magazine, the mismatch in tone of the final two words compared with the rest of the sentence was such that the reading experience was changed from "run-of-the-mill magical realism to true, subversive comedy". An instance of irony is illustrated by Cal's grandparents and parents: His grandparents assimilate into American culture through hard work and struggles while retaining certain old customs. His parents, however, abandon their roots for a more comfortable lifestyle. In another incident, the diner owned by the Stephanides is engulfed in flames during the 1967 Detroit riot. Cal notes that "[s]hameful as it is to say, the riots were the best thing that ever happened to us." The diner was insured and the Stephanides gain a windfall payout. Narrative modes Middlesex is written in the form of a memoir, and switches between the first and the third person in several spots. Used as a comedic device, the third person narratives illustrate Cal's estrangement from Calliope: When he refers to her in the third person, he is identifying her as someone other than him. Patricia Chu, a scholar of English literature, noted the effectiveness of this style in the chapter in which the adolescent Callie searches for information on hermaphroditism. As the teenager reads Webster's Dictionary, following the trail of definitions related to her condition, she reaches the entry for hermaphrodite. The narration switches from personal to external, lending poignancy to the character's final discovery as she confronts the word "monster". Although the protagonist switches gender throughout the book, Cal's manners of speech and thought are identical to Callie's. Believing that males and females have no inherent disparities in their writing styles, Eugenides treated Cal and Callie as the same person, in terms of narrative voice. He also fixed the narrative voice in terms of age by setting up Cal to relate the entire story at one time. Eugenides gave his protagonist a mostly male outlook, justifying his treatment with the reasoning that Cal or Callie was a man in terms of appearance, sexual desires, and the brain. He asked his wife and other women to review his approaches on Cal's feminine views. The "emotional stuff" was accurate but Eugenides had to refine certain details, such as those about toenail polish. At the beginning of the book when Cal discusses