"Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides

I really liked this book and enjoyed reading it, but then I was accosted by plenty of opinions that do not esteem the novel in the same light as me.  I read some reviews that say the book is actually two books: one about the Greek immigrant experience in America and the other about a hermaphrodite, or "Intersex" third-generation Greek-American boy/girl Caliope, or Cali, and later Cal.

The book starts in the 1920s, when the Greeks tried to materialize the "Megali Idea" or the "Great Idea" of re-conquering Byzantine lands in Asia Minor.  Cali's grandparents, Lefterios "Lefty" and Desdemona, a brother an sister, run away from their village of Bursa, north of Smyrna.  Lefty and Desdemona get on a ship first to Athens, then to America, Ellis Island, and play a number on the other passengers presenting themselves as two strangers who just met on the ship.  The brother and sister got married in the US and had two children.  Unbeknown to them, they were carrying a recessive chromosome for Hermaphroditus, which however skipped their children. 

To make things more interesting, the daughter of Lefty and Desdemona, Tessy, married her first cousin, Milton, and their second child, the daughter Calliope, was born with recessive hermaphrodite genitalia.  The life of Milton and Tessy is described and how they slowly melted into the American normal, even forgetting to write, and eventually even speak Greek.  Cali falls in love with a girl in her class when she reaches puberty, but when she does not get her period by 14 - her parents take her to a doctor and her hermaphrodite condition is discovered.  She runs away from the sex change clinic, since she feels a boy, not a girl and doesn't want to be a girl.  Eventually she ends working in a strip join in San Francisco and after the gig is busted she returns home to Detroit to find her father died in a car accident.

Thinking back, the book does lack a certain uniform strength, but it is nevertheless an enormously entertaining read.