Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

So, while in PIB, I finished my latest novel. I've had this one for about 3 years and never had the gumption to tackle it. I finally buckled down and made it happen and I'm glad I did.

Middlesex is an epic novel about family, secrets, desires and change. It features a Greek-American family from their immigration into the United States during the 1920s to the main character, Calliope ("Cal") Stephanides who, at the age of 14 in 1974, is discovered to be a psuedohermaphrodite. In other words, Cal has been raised as a girl but in fact has a defect on her/his 5th chromosome that has given him/her both male and female parts. Throughout the novel, Cal tells how his body betrayed him through his family's actions and history. Cal recounts for the reader the effect that these actions and desires held by his own relatives have shaped all of their lives - most often in a negative way. Cal/Jeffrey Eugenides has an amazing sense of humor and incorporates it well in what could be (but is not) a tragic/depressing novel.

I highly recommend this novel. It read like Steinbeck (high compliments indeed) and kept me enthralled and yet sightly shocked and disgusted at times (kind of like when you pass a horrible accident but can't NOT look). It was a piece of fiction but read like a memoir and it makes me wonder where the hell Eugenides came up with such an idea...some of this had to be true! Anyway read this novel, you won't be disappointed.